A Glass Darkly
by Overlithe77
Summary: A place for all my non-what if/alternate timeline AUs: complete AUs, genderswitches, mirrorverse AUs, etc. Latest: Nation-switch stories exploring what could have happened if a character had been born in a different nation than their canon one: Fire Nation!Katara, Earth Kingdom!Azula, plus two other stories coming soon.
1. Family

**Title: Family**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom:** _Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Summary:** Zuko has to protect the Avatar. Even if he doesn't know if she'll save the world or destroy it. Mirrorverse (more or less) AU.

**Characters/Pairings:** Zuko, Azula, references to other characters; gen

**Prompt: fanfic100** prompt 024. Family.

**Word Count:** 1449

**Rating:** T

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and concepts created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, and owned by Nickelodeon and various other corporations/people. I'm not making any money and do not intend any copyright or trademark infringement.

* * *

><p><strong>Family<strong>

* * *

><p>Zuko had thought he would hate the caves—he didn't like cold air, and, more importantly, he would be <em>underground<em>—but there was something almost soothing about the emptiness and the clean smell and the soft drip of water. It reminded him of the place, huddled above a ring of clouds, where his—where _the Avatar_ had learned airbending.

Well, part of her had, at least.

He looked around to make sure no Imperial soldiers had followed him, and lifted the curtain of kudzu hiding a hole barely wide enough for a crouching person. After several yards, the ceiling sloped upwards. He lit a flame in his palm, and put it out when he reached a vast stone cavern. Light trickled in through a small opening far above, careened down an army of stalactites, fell on a lake that smelled of copper and was the colour of dragonfly wings.

'You're late,' his sister said. He stepped closer to where she crouched by the lake; small waves moved back and forth in time with the motions of her hand. 'And you're _wet_.'

'It was raining.' The hand stopped its motions, turned towards him. A gust of wind nearly knocked him off his feet.

'That's better,' Azula said in a voice full of thorns, and got to her feet.

When they were—

_home_

—little, his sister had been like an ember in his shoe. He was sure little sisters were supposed to be annoyances, but Azula elevated it to an art form, like someone pinning mantis-butterflies to cork. Sometimes he'd be walking down the corridor, hear a bright, malicious titter, and he'd be sure that even though the house was tiny, its walls thin like rice paper, she'd been listening at the door, waiting for his footsteps. _What's so funny?_

_Oh, nothing. Just something my friends told me._

It was only later that everyone started realising that Azula's "friends" weren't going away.

_The voices aren't real, Azula._

But they were. But the Avatar really carried one thousand lives, and sometimes they all babbled at once.

And just because the Avatar had been the Earth Emperor's right hand, it didn't mean she couldn't be reborn to a nobody family in a nobody city in a far-flung colony.

'I brought you something to eat,' he said, and began unloading his satchel; the air filled with the smell of roasted picken meat. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Azula's hair, hanging down like seaweed. When she'd gone away, to the place they all thought was supposed to cure her… problem, he'd told himself he was happy. Maybe she wouldn't be such a horrible _brat_ when she came back, and now he finally didn't have to put up with someone who sneaked cockroach-fleas into his bed and pinched him with burning fingers under the table. He'd pushed aside the screen that separated her room from his and picked up the comb lying on her bed, and told himself he was happy, over and over again, as something knotted inside him.

Azula inspected a slightly damp package. 'Cabbage rolls? You always had terrible taste, Zuzu.' Then her face turned blank. Her grip on the package didn't slacken, but her body seemed to be somehow _unstrung_, a puppet whose strings had been cut and who remained standing due to sheer inertia.

He moved to touch her arm, but her eyes brightened to life again, hardened. He didn't say anything. It was better if they pretended her _episodes_ didn't happen. 'Found anything that will let us get into Ba Sing Se?' she said as she unwrapped a cabbage roll and wrinkled her nose in disdain.

'You still have to learn waterbending,' he said.

She rolled her eyes. 'Water is everywhere, dumdum. The Earth Emperor, on the other hand, is in Ba Sing Se.'

And once they got to Ba Sing Se, she would—

—depose the Earth Emperor, liberate the colonies, stop the rebellions, and bring harmony to the world.

—be instantly defeated and sent to where they could finish chaining up her mind. If he was lucky, he'd get killed. Maybe she'd even care.

—kill the Earth Emperor and start a great war.

—serve the world by serving the Emperor, her past life finally catching up with her.

—crouch down in one corner and rock back and forth, eyes dull, mouth spilling out words like broken glass. Maybe the earth would shake along with her. Volcanoes erupt. Oceans boil.

'You are free to leave, you know,' she said, and picked at a ragged fingernail. 'If you ask nicely, maybe I'll draw you a map.' She focused her attention on the rest of the food, as though his decision didn't concern her in the slightest.

_Maybe I _will_ go_, he wanted to shout. _You're just some awful, crazy girl with a weapon inside her. Go off to Ba Sing Se on your own. Or wherever. You don't care, and I don't either._

Only…

Only when they'd been with that little rag-tag bunch of Air Warriors, one evening he had found her sitting on one of the walls, legs dangling above a drop so impossibly high clouds curdled below her feet, gaze lost where the mountaintops were turning from gold to purple.

Sometimes he thought his sister was three different people. One was willing to spend hours meditating, then train tumbles and spins until the skin on her hands and feet was cracked and bleeding and he was sure her tendons must feel like hot wires of pain—just so she could master some airbending skill and perform it with that superior little smile, as though they were small children again and this was just another game she couldn't lose and he couldn't win.

The other one had eyes that glowed with a terrible light and a voice that could pull the fire from the earth and the clouds from the sky, and in the rare occasions that one showed up, Zuko was sure both he and Azula, the frail little shell of skin and bone and sinew, were as inconsequential as spiderflies.

The third one was simply _broken_.

Right then, on that mountaintop wall, she was just the one who was broken. 'Why do you come with me?' she had said, in a voice that had been surprisingly soft and shaky.

For her, at least.

He shrugged. 'Because after fa—' No, they never talked about him. 'Because mother told me to find you,' he'd said, then, after a while, added, 'Because you're my s—'

'Don't, dumdum,' she'd said. Her face had been turned away from his, but he could tell she wasn't mocking. Just desperate.

So he'd been quiet, and after what had felt like a very long time but had only been long enough for the air to get a fraction colder and the dusting of stars a fraction brighter, she'd reached out for his hand. He had known that if he said something, she'd spit poison at him and hurry away, so he just squeezed her hand and was silent.

Only…

Only it _hadn't_ been raining. He had been wet because, in the city's market, he hadn't moved out of the way of a patrol fast enough, and a boulder had rammed him straight into a puddle. And then he had stopped himself from going for the blade strapped to his back—Azula hadn't been the only one to pick up new skills during their travels—and had hoped his hands weren't smoking as he wiped mud off his face and tightened his cloak around him, the hood pulled down over his face.

He sighed, reached into the satchel again, and unfolded a poorly printed poster. It was soggy and some of the ink had oozed together in a mess of yellows and reds, but most of the characters were still legible. Azula snatched it from his hands. 'That circus will be here in two days,' he said, and made no effort to get the poster back. 'Ba Sing Se is the last stop on their tour. Those were pasted all over the place. It must be a big circus.' Wanted posters were also pasted all over the place, but there was no need to mention those.

'Which means they need a lot of acts.' She turned her face towards him. 'You're not _completely_ useless,' she drawled, but the sharpness in her voice was tucked away. In the powdery light, she looked almost like an ordinary fourteen-year-old girl. 'Maybe you can be a knife-thrower.'

'And you could be an acrobat.'

She only let out a snort, and he didn't laugh, because he never did.

But right then, it was enough.

* * *

><p>++The End++<p> 


	2. Time and Tide

**Title: Time and Tide**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom: **_Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Summary:** The crew of _The Water Witch's Revenge_ makes an unusual discovery. Pirate AU.

**Characters/Pairings:** Katara, Sokka; gen

**Prompt: avatar_500** prompt 030. Pirate; **fanfic100** prompt 019. White

**Word Count:** 500

**Rating:** T

**Warnings:** Mildly graphic references to Kya's death.

**Author's Note: **Thank you to **Melizza-XoXo- **for reviewing the previous story in this series, and to all the people who favourited the first fic. This second fic is a pirate AU loosely inspired by the _Pirates of the Caribbean_ film series and I hope you all enjoy this one as well.

* * *

><p><strong>Time and Tide<strong>

* * *

><p>The <em>Revenge<em> didn't need wind to sail, but still Katara didn't like being becalmed. All around them the sea was white with pack ice, heavy with icebergs that towered high above their tallest mast. She kept her hands on the wheel as the ship drifted in a sluggish current, the sound of the ice cracking against the keel filling up air that was as sharp and grey as a newly forged blade.

Last evening they—well, Sokka—had spotted a brief glow of red, a plume of smoke. She had seen nothing in the spyglass, but even so, there was a knot of unease deep in her belly. Fire Navy ships—or worse, the Phoenix King's privateers—didn't usually come this far south, which was why waterfolk came here to stock up on fresh water and seal jerky.

Even so…

Even so, the world was becoming smaller and smaller, and fuller and fuller of steam and red-and-black flags, and even if she and her crew were thieves, well, at least they were honest thieves. They didn't grind up whatever stood in their way and call it right, or ordered.

She turned starboard a fraction and felt the ship under her, from clam-barnacled keel to the colours sagging against the mast. Last night, for the first time in years, she had dreamed again of being below deck in _The Water Witch_ as water rushed in through a breached hull, turning her mother's blood to ribbons of pink.

Footsteps approached her. 'You've got a course for us, Sokka?' she asked. Somehow her brother's… _improved_ instruments always ended up working, even if his drawings were of the sort that made an astrolabe look like a legless cat.

'In due course, of course,' he said. She groaned to herself, but he didn't have time to laugh at his own joke. Something rammed against the hull hard enough to nearly knock her over; the thud shook her bones. In a second, Sokka had straightened up again and was rushing below deck, shouting orders, but she already knew they weren't letting in water. She raced to the port side, ready to bend them a current.

Something glowed dimly under the grey and white sea. Her heart drummed against her breastbone. Had they struck the underwater part of an iceberg? They could be worse than reefs, worse than sand bars. But no, the glow drifted back and forth, something bobbing a few fathoms below the surface. She dropped into a bending stance and pulled the thing up. Ice cracked. Water sprayed the decks. Sokka was back, already calling for poles, hooks.

A vast sphere of ice floated by the ship's side, bathed deck and crew and sails in a cold blue light. 'What is that thing?' Sokka said. Katara looked down, unafraid. Inside the ice there were shapes: a large animal and a man—no, a boy. His eyes glowed white.

She smiled, just a little.

Maybe the world wasn't that small after all.

* * *

><p>++The End++<p> 


	3. Moonrise

**Title: Moonrise**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom: **_Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Summary:** Yue has to fulfil her duty to her people. No matter what it takes. A mix of what-if, mirrorverse, and superpowers AU.

**Characters/Pairings:** Yue, Long Feng; gen

**Prompt: avatar_500** prompt 031. Mirror; **fanfic100** prompt 086. Choices

**Word Count:** 497

**Rating:** T+

**Warnings:** Creepiness.

**Author's Note:** Utopia Justifies the Means is one of my favourite character tropes. You can probably tell. Thank you to **Dimples-3** for reviewing the previous story in this series.

* * *

><p><strong>Moonrise<strong>

* * *

><p>Yue did not like Ba Sing Se. It was big, and noisy, and smelly, and dust always clung to your skin and clothes. But at least it wasn't as hot as the Fire Islands, where the sunlight felt like a closed fist, and here amidst the University's ponds, vast and shimmering and teeming with fish, she could close her eyes and almost pretend she was back home.<p>

'He's here, Lady Yue.'

Her eyes snapped open. White banners hung against the stone walls, limp in the afternoon heat. 'Just Yue,' she said, and rose to her feet. She had been Princess Yue, once; it felt like a lifetime ago, even though she was only sixteen.

But her name didn't matter, and her thoughts about Ba Sing Se—or anywhere else, come to that—didn't matter either. All that mattered was her duty to her family, her people. Sometimes she was sure that included even the smallest eyeless thing squirming in ocean silt.

'Long Feng,' she said, as his escort approached. He wasn't restrained, and she could see a defiant, mocking glint under the smooth mask of his face. Somewhere in the gardens, a bird wailed once, fell silent.

What mattered was that sixteen years ago, the world had been thick with wars, lines of strife burning the breadth and height of the globe. And so, in their little corner of ice that was growing smaller and smaller, her parents had made a bargain that was terrible and unbreakable.

She held out a sheaf of papers, each sheet dark with tightly-packed characters. 'I know you wrote these,' she said. 'I know what you've been plotting.'

Long Feng said nothing, and for a moment she was sure he wasn't going to answer. Then, glint of defiance undimmed, he spoke. 'Nothing I say could make any conceivable difference.'

'No,' she said, and closed her eyes.

_(It is the moon that opens them.)_

In the afternoon sky, a rind of moon swelled into a great silver eye. Clouds darkened to deep charcoal. The guards tensed.

_(She watches, far above the clouds. A human falls to his knees with a strangled cry, blood knotting in his veins, tightening in his heart, bubbling in his lungs and mouth. Water swells in the dry grass. Ponds simmer.)_

_(When time is meaningless, there is no difference between a beating and a still heart.)_

'I don't kill,' she said, and released him—

_mostly_

—undamaged. He dropped to the ground with a gasp as the moon receded. The sky brightened again.

_(A brain can be filled with blood. Locked in a body that can't move, or speak.)_

She sighed. She was—

_sad_

—tired; perhaps more than anyone else in the world.

But that, too, didn't matter.

She stepped closer to where Long Feng was still on the ground. 'When I was a child, there had always been war,' she said. 'Now there isn't. I exist to keep it that way.' She turned around. 'Don't imperil that again.'

* * *

><p>++The End++<p>

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note:<strong> Apparently, Long Feng's fate is to be schooled by teenaged girls in ALL the universes, who knew? ;) The line about there being no difference between a beating and a still heart is loosely based on a line in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' _Watchmen_ in which Dr Manhattan thinks about how a live body and a dead one have the same number of molecules.


	4. Despicable We

**Title: Despicable We**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom:** _Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Summary:** The family that slays together stays together. Or, a day in the (evil) life of Ozai/Flashpoint, Ursa/Phantom, Azula/Slingshot, and Zuko/I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT, OK? Super-villains/super-heroes action comedy AU.

**Characters/Pairings:** Azula, Zuko, Ursa, Ozai, Katara, Sokka, Toph, Aang; gen with some Ozai/Ursa

**Prompt: fanfic100** prompt 043. Square

**Word Count:** 9,738

**Rating:** K+

**Warnings:** Cartoonish violence, super-villains doing their super-villain thing.

**Disclaimer:** This was inspired by many, many comics/movies/books, including, but not limited to, _Despicable Me_ (obviously), _The Incredibles_, the DCU, the Fantastic Four, the _Addams Family_ film series, etc. (There's a full disclaimer at the end of the fic.)

**Author's Note:** This fic is a gift for the amazing **muffinbitch**, who also came up with the rabid octo-bears. Hope you enjoy this, my dear! Many thanks to **greedyslayer** for her suggestions regarding Azula and Zuko's super-powers. In keeping with the whole comics feel I'm trying to go for, this story takes place in a version of the canon universe with steampunk-ish counterparts of our contemporary RL technology (and with super-powers instead of bending, obviously). A big thank you to everyone who's been reading and commenting on these AU stories—I hope you'll enjoy this one!

* * *

><p><strong>Despicable We<strong>

* * *

><p>Azula looked out the window and let out a sigh of displeasure. They were stuck in a snarl of traffic, moving at a snail-sloth's pace over a canal bridge. It was still early morning, but it was a hot summer and the air was already hazy with heat and the milky spill of water vapour from the car engines. The city glinted in the hard sunlight. She glanced over at Zuko, who was making a point of staying on his side of the invisible line bisecting the scarlet-and-gold seat. Their eyes met for the briefest second and he went back to staring out his window, his face bearing an expression of constipated glumness.<p>

Not that he really had any other kind of expression.

She leaned back in her side of the seat and stared at her fingernails for a few seconds before she let her fingers droop, soft and boneless like uncooked dough. They fell down to her wrist, then her elbow. She swung them back and forth a little.

Zuko kept staring, perfectly still, but she could see a muscle twitching in his cheek.

She started twisting her fingers together.

'Quit it,' Zuko hissed. Despite everything, he was still her brother, so he managed to hiss a sentence that had no sibilants at all.

Azula made a show of ignoring him and began working her fingers into a fetching braid.

'Stop using your power,' he said. 'We're not supposed to do it in—'

'No one's _seeing_ me, Zu-Zu,' she said, sounding as though she were explaining things to a particularly dim toddler. She stretched the tip of one of the braided fingers until it was wriggling on the no man's land in the middle of the seat.

'Stop it,' Zuko said, and yanked on her fingers hard enough for them to nearly slap her own face as they bounced back.

She ignored the sting in her hand and increased the pitch and volume of her voice. 'Mother, Zuko hit me!'

'What? You started it! Mother, I was only trying to get her to—'

Even though the traffic was nearly at a standstill, Ursa didn't bother to turn her head to look at them. 'Children, you will have plenty of time to try to kill each other later. Now behave.'

'But—' the two of them chorused, but when Ursa cut in, her voice was streaked with steel.

'That's enough. Do not make me activate the ejection seat.'

Azula grumbled to herself as she settled back into her seat, resisting the urge to stick her tongue out. She could stretch it into all sorts of shapes, so it took considerable willpower. She couldn't, however, resist stealing another glance at Zuko, who had gone back to staring out his window, his expression having darkened from "constipated" to "just swallowed a scorpion-bee".

She made a point of ignoring him during the fifteen minutes it took mother to drive out of the rush of traffic and into a warren of smaller streets criss-crossing the city centre. They circled Hu Xin Plaza, its white stone speckled with porcupigeons, and edged into an alleyway snaking between buildings.

'Come on, children,' Ursa said as the motor quietened with a clang of gears. The three of them stepped out of the car. 'Let me check you.'

Azula wrinkled her nose in distaste as she almost stepped on a clump of noodles that had oozed out from a rubbish barrel. The air smelled of tea grounds and, faintly, of stale oil. Ursa adjusted collars and sleeves—Azula tried not to squirm—and finished by straightening out Azula's pigtails. 'Look at you,' she said as she placed her hands on both her children's shoulders. 'Oh, I could just eat you alive! But no, you're still too young,' she finished with a wan smile and a pat on Azula's cheek, as if testing for plumpness. Her hands withdrew; she straightened up. 'Ready?'

They nodded. Azula made sure she nodded more vehemently than Zuko, who glared at her.

'Come on.' They wandered out into the plaza, mixing with the morning crowds. They approached one of the buildings, walked up a flight of marble steps and under the banner saying _Zhen First Bank—The Capital City's First Choice_, and moved past a set of elaborately carved double doors. In the wide hall inside, customers and clerks milled about. Azula smiled vacantly as she scanned the place for threats, hoping she looked like a fourteen-year-old girl on an errand with her mother.

Well, an _ordinary_ fourteen-year-old girl on an _ordinary_ errand with her mother.

She was sure she could look ordinary better than Zuko did, in any case.

Once mother was sure the guards' attention slid right over them, they ducked behind one of the pillars and into a short corridor. Ursa signalled to Azula and Zuko, then light bent around her. Her shape blurred; in the blink of an eye, she was completely invisible. Soft-sounding footsteps drew away from them. The door at the end of the corridor slid open, as if pushed by a phantom wind.

There was a brief squeal and a couple of thumps.

The door opened again and a hand popped out, beckoning them.

Azula and Zuko entered the bathroom, where mother had finished stuffing the attendant into a closet, and was now changing into her costume. _Finally_, Azula thought, and promptly got rid of the revolting pigtails. Seconds later, she was back in the scarlet-and-black costume, the mask settling on her face like a second skin. Her heart beat a steady tattoo in her chest.

When she put on the mask, she wasn't just the daughter of two of the greatest super-villains in the world. She wasn't just Azula—even though being Azula was being practically perfect in every way, she thought with a quick flush of satisfaction. It wasn't arrogance when it was true, after all.

When she put on the mask, she was—

_fearless doubtless_

—Slingshot, brilliant like a diamond and twice as hard. Slingshot, who would one day be the super-villain other super-villains told scary stories about. Slingshot, the scourge of…

Well, the scourge of _something_. She was still working on a suitably terrifying tag line.

'Ready, children?' mother—Phantom—said, and dug out the timepiece from her utility belt. 'We break the safe open at 10. Synchronise timepieces.'

Azula hurriedly worked the mechanism on her own timepiece.

'All right.' Ursa erased herself from sight again. 'See you down there, and be evil.'

The door slid open, then shut. Azula headed over to one of the windows, grumbling 'I'm always evil' under her breath. 'Come on, dum-dum,' she added, louder, but only once she was sure Ursa was out of earshot.

Like the blueprints had indicated, the bathroom window opened into a slice of gated courtyard abutted on all sides by the backs of other buildings. There had been a drizzle of rain during the night, and despite the heat, the ground still smelled damp. There was probably some sort of philosophical statement to be made about the chipped plaster and concrete and the rubbish barrels hidden behind the gleaming facades of Capital City, but she had never been one for philosophy.

Epic crime was more her style.

Zuko climbed onto the sill. 'I don't see why you have to be the one to get us up there,' he said.

'We're trying to be discreet here,' she said, and stretched upwards. Her hands clamped on the edge of the first roof. The tiles dug into her palms, but she held tight.

'I can be discreet,' Zuko said, and grabbed onto her leg as she snorted in derision. Azula focused on the next storey—using her power felt like having itching powder under her skin, but she had long since learned to ignore the sensation—and swung her legs up, the air whipping her face. Zuko landed on the second roof with a thud and grabbed her hands as she snapped to his side, using her momentum to swing her up.

Her feet scrabbled for purchase on the next roof, but she didn't even think of the fall or the weak pull in her stomach as she shot up and hoisted her brother onto the roof above her. She was sure she could do this balanced on a razor-thin line. She was Slighshot and she was unstoppable.

'That must be why I have to carry you,' she said as she swung onto the next roof. The city spread above her, a cloud of stone and steel and glittering glass. 'Because of the size of your… discretion.' _Unstoppable_ and _witty_, she thought, and smirked smugly to herself.

'I'm the one carrying you!'

'Yes, you're indispensable. Maybe we should change your mask name to Ballast.'

They landed on top on the building before he could reply. Their bickering would be shelved for a while, she acknowledged with a glance as quick and sharp as a whip-crack.

There would be plenty more time for violence later on, anyway.

Zuko strode over to a small cube of concrete and ripped its door off, inch-thick metal crumpling under his fingers like rice paper, then reached inside and yanked out a mess of wires, which writhed and fizzed for a few seconds. Water dripped from the hydraulic system. Azula wrinkled her nose at the smell of burning copper. 'Silent alarm… silenced,' Zuko said, and glared at her, presumably expecting her to giggle like an idiot.

Instead, she rolled her eyes and walked over to the door leading back into the building. His expression turned, somehow, a fraction more sullen—she made a mental note to mock him later about that being his _real_ super-power—but he hurried to her side and yanked the door off its hinges.

A quick look at her timepiece told her they only had five minutes to get down to the basement containing the vault, but it was easy when you were fast, had the blueprints memorised, and could punch people around a corner. They reached the vault's door with a minute to spare.

Restraints were tying themselves around the last of a pile of unconscious guards.

'There you are,' Ursa said, and shimmered back into sight. She gave her unconscious victim one last shove and straightened up. 'Did you knock out a lot of people?'

'I knocked out more,' Azula said before Zuko could reply, and scurried over to the vault door. It was the size of a monorail tunnel. Light slicked bolts and tumblers larger than her head.

A barely worthy challenge, she told herself, and stretched and twisted one hand into a thread thin enough to slip into a gap in the mechanism. 'Fifty seconds,' Ursa said, and Azula was suddenly very aware of her own breath and the hard edges of the metal encasing her arm. She kept pushing, deeper and deeper until the world had tightened to the width of her fingers.

'Forty seconds.'

_I know!_ she almost snapped, but instead gritted her teeth and glared at the groaning lock. She was Slingshot; a mere lock couldn't defeat her. She pressed onwards, the itchiness under her skin pushed away by dull pain. Blood beat in her ears. Turn, turn, flip, turn. _Come on, lock. It's time to surrender_. Another tumbler began to turn, then ground to a halt. She kept pushing it, but her arm felt like it had been welded in place.

'Thirty seconds.'

_Come on!_ She was Slingshot! She was invincible! She was unstoppable! She was—

'Are you stuck, darling?' mother asked. Her tone was even, but Azula was sure she was trying not to laugh.

_Twenty-five._

'… _No_.' She looked at the lock again. The light-whitened steel looked like a toothy grin, mocking her. 'I'll be done in a—'

'No time,' Ursa said behind her. 'Zuko, we need your special skills.'

_Twenty._

Azula wrung her arm out of the lock; it flopped to the floor in a rubbery heap. 'Yes, Zu-Zu, do your thing,' she said, voice dripping with acid.

Zuko's gaze went from her to their mother and finally settled, as he sighed, on some point between them. He undid his belt and reached for his costume.

_Fifteen._

'No time!' Azula said, and she couldn't avoid a note of satisfaction. Nothing soothed embarrassment—not that she _couldn't_ open the lock, the only issue had been _time_—more than passing it on to somebody else.

Especially if that somebody else was her brother.

Ursa glanced at her timepiece. 'She's right. Go on, dear.'

_Ten._

Zuko pressed his lips together so hard his mouth almost vanished and walked over to the vault door. Azula smiled sweetly at him. Whoever had said you couldn't kill with kindness had obviously not grown up in her family. You could kill with practically anything. Kindness. Friendship. Understanding. Fruit pies. _I hate you_, her brother mouthed. _I hate you more_, she replied, then stepped back. 'Five seconds, hurry up.'

He didn't need five seconds, she knew: it took him less than one to _burst_ out with a sound like a rockslide. Black and red rags fluttered to the floor, the heat-resistent, stretch-resistant, everything-resistant fabric still unable to resist her brother.

He crouched in front of the vault door, a creature too large to stand up straight in the corridor, looking as if someone had decided to carve a small mountain into a humanoid shape and had given up halfway through. You almost expected some moss, and possibly a cloud or two.

Not that he was _actually_ made of rock. Unlike rock, her brother could withstand direct hits from blast rays, extreme cold, extreme heat, and acid. Mother and father had conducted extensive tests.

She'd helped.

'Do it already,' she drawled. Zuko took a breath like a rumbling factory engine—presumably he had lungs of _some_ sort somewhere inside—grabbed the vault door with hands the size of koala-sheep, and yanked. The door came off with a burst of dust and a scream of shattering stone. He put it to one side as if it were a cardboard prop.

'Ah. Good timing.' Azula turned around to see their father stride into the corridor, wisps of smoke still clinging to him. She hurried to his side, but he didn't break his stride. 'Sixty seconds, everyone.'

'We just opened up the vault,' Azula said, stretching her legs to keep up with his pace.

'Yes, I can see that,' father said. He glanced around the corridor. 'Do put some clothes on, son.'

'I'm trying!'

Azula rolled her eyes at her brother. He'd gone back to his human shape and was crouching half out of sight behind the vault door, rummaging in his utility belt for his spare uniform. Luckily for him, it folded tightly.

'Any trouble upstairs, dear?' Ursa asked as Ozai drew closer to the steel bars behind the eviscerated vault door. White fire spilled from his hands to his elbows, licked at his hair. Two fire balls slammed into the bars and the steel melted with a smell of burning phosphorus.

'Same as always,' he said. The white flames died down. Molten steel dripped down like smoking rubies. 'You?'

One of the tied-up guards came to with a moan and tried to squirm out of her bonds. Ursa whipped out a spray from her belt, doused her face, and kicked her back onto the human pile. 'Can't complain,' she said. 'Come here, children.'

Azula hurried to her side and Zuko hopped into place, still adjusting his uniform's left leg. A force-field rose in time with Ursa's hands with an almost inaudible hum and a faint scent of ozone. Cold trickled down Azula's neck. No matter how many times she'd been under her mother's shields, she still couldn't help but be a little mesmerised by the way they made everything look distorted, as though seen through rippling water. The first time she'd been inside a force-field underwater—they'd been making a getaway through the sewers—she'd expected it to look like a bubble of glass, but instead the distortion had just intensified. She'd tried to put her hand through the shield, to see if it was as hard to penetrate from the inside as from the outside, but Ursa had told her to stop messing with the force-fields, then added that if she was going to cut off her child's hand, it was going to be on purpose.

Liquid metal dripped on top of the force-field and the ragged edges of the bars bent of out the way as the four of them stepped into the vault, which was pretty much like all the other ones Azula had seen before: piles of bags full of coins and paper money, row upon row of identical drawers. Azula stepped closer to some of them as soon as the force-field winked out. Inside the safes there must be uncut diamonds, letters of credit, jade necklaces, rare documents. Secrets. She glanced at her timepiece. Forty seconds. 'May I—'

'No,' Ozai said curtly, and stepped over to their real target.

There was one exception to the vault's bureaucratic greyness. Off to one side, nearly tucked out of sight behind a set of shelves, stood a display case. The glass was so thick the object inside looked like it was clouded by water, but the four of them thought, tasted, dreamed, and breathed crime and its (highly profitable) wages. They'd find a piece of loot like the Golden Dragon Egg blindfolded and upside-down inside a sinkhole full of quicksand.

Ozai shot another fireball at the panel in the stand, making metal burst open and gears spill out. Another blow of white fire smashed the case open. He reached forward and picked up the Egg gingerly with both hands, shaking shards of glass away. Light careened over ruby and emerald eyes, curling dragons with jewelled scales, elaborate gold filigree. 'At last,' he said, and let out an evil cackle. Azula perked up; her father could make even words like "noodles and sauce" sizzle with malice.

'At last,' he repeated, cradling the Egg in one arm. It was worth the emphasis. The Golden Dragon Egg had a length history, rich in bloodshed and madness. Like any great super-villain trophy, it had driven people to murder, theft, insanity. After Black Venom's latest trip to the Asylum for the Criminally Super-gifted, it had vanished out of sight, and it had taken them months to track down its new whereabouts. To be fair, half of that time had been taken up with constructing a place of pride for it in the lair and picturing the look on all the other super-villains' faces, but that hardly diminished the effort. 'And now it's all mine.' Ursa gave Ozai a look that would be deadly once she completed the research. 'I mean yours,' Ozai said hurriedly. 'I mean ours.'

Mother's frown softened into a slight smile. 'Let's head back to the lair.'

They climbed back to the bank's main room with fifteen seconds to spare. Smoke still lingered in the air. Everybody who'd been in the room was still on the floor, a few passed out, others looking from side to side, eyes wide and watery, like small furry animals scanning for predators. A row of guards and bank workers sat bound and gagged against a counter, all holding small round devices connected by a wire. The face of the man in the middle was shiny with sweat and possibly tears.

'See?' Ozai said to him. 'I told you those things wouldn't explode as long as you didn't shake them.' He kicked the device off the man's hands. Gasps rang out. The sphere rolled to the ground, drew to a halt, snapped open, and started playing a cheery tune.

Even Zuko joined in the laughter.

'Citizens, thank you once again for your co-operation,' Ozai said as they walked towards the front doors. 'You'll live to be terrorised another day.'

Ursa slammed two force-fields into the ceiling. Chunks of masonry rained down; screams rippled out.

'See you in your nightmares,' Azula said.

'Don't, uh, close your eyes,' Zuko said, then his face hardened, this time metaphorically.

A burst of white fire blew the front doors open. As they headed outside, Azula looked up. Scorched stone was not the most viable of writing media, but even so, Azula could make out the characters. Her father had burned _Crime pays_ over the bank's front doors.

There was a reason the classics were the classics.

:=:

'We have company,' Ursa whispered as soon as they stepped into the light outside.

The words were unnecessary: a half-ring of cars floated right in front of them, hovering like metal buzzard-wasps. A trio of costumed figures stood several yards away on the white stone, the cars trembling in time with the raised hands of the girl in the middle. Grey swirled in her costume and mask, and even her hair was gathered up in a pair of ridiculous loops. A shorter, stockier girl stood on her right, cape streaming in a breeze, her hood a particularly bilious shade of green. A boy with a belt and a pair of bandoliers laden with gadgets flanked her on the other side.

Behind them, the plaza had emptied. People abandoned vehicles stuck in side-streets, ducked into shops. Even the porcupigeons seemed to have flown away, only a few stragglers remaining here and there. The only sounds were the babbling of the fountain in the middle of the plaza and the rustle of Shockwave's cape.

Azula glanced at her family. Father smirked. Mother's face was still. Zuko's expression was… well, few things made it change much.

'Well, if it isn't the Fearsome Four,' said the girl in the middle.

Pebbles rolled on the ground in front of Shockwave. 'It's great you guys have learned to count that high,' she said.

'Well, if it isn't the Minutemen,' Ozai said. 'Still advertising your troubles with performance, I see.'

Azula let out a peal of laughter. It echoed across the empty plaza and startled the few remaining porcupigeons into a flutter of wings. _Oh, yes_, Azula thought, and beamed to herself. That one evil cackle had been _perfect_.

Once the sound faded, she realised Boomerang had joined in with a chuckle. Enigma glared at him; the hovering cars wobbled a little.

'What?' Boomerang said. 'It was funny.'

'I told you guys we should have gone with—'

A burst of white fire struck the ground in front of the trio. Enigma sent the cars flying, but they crashed into Ursa's force-field with a scream of metal and a shower of glass and metal chunks. Ursa pushed the shield forward, sending the wreckage spinning towards the three Minutemen.

Azula glanced at her family. Father nodded, then looked at Zuko.

Time slowed. She darted down the steps, lightning zipping through air. The knot in her muscles vanished. Her nerves turned to live wires.

This was the best thing about being a super-villain. Better than the look of terror on other people's faces. Better than showing up in five-column headlines involving the words "super-villains terrorise city". Even better than sneaking into Zuko's bedroom to rig booby-traps in the floor around his bed.

She could see the sun striking jewelled fire off the fountain's water, the waver of vibrations in the air in front of Shockwave as she rushed towards her.

'Here,' Ozai said, and tossed the Egg to Ursa, who promptly turned invisible.

'Get her!' Enigma said. Azula stretched out of the way of one of Shockwave's strikes and spun around her to grab her from the back. Enigma sent one of the smashed cars flying towards them. Azula dodged out of the way, pulling her prisoner along with her, but Shockwave grabbed her hands—the other girl might not be able to see her, but she could _sense_ her—and let out a burst of sonic waves that rammed into her like a closed fist and nearly made her eardrums bleed. Azula jumped back and stretched her hands to shield her ears. Before she could swipe Shockwave with her leg, Boomerang hurled a black sphere at her.

She wove out of the way and the ball exploded on the spot where she'd stood half a second before. Off to her left father was covered in white fire, propelling himself off the ground so he could shower down strikes on Enigma. Zuko ripped up large chunks off the cars on the ground to throw at Shockwave. Azula dodged out of the way of Boomerang's explosives again, once, twice, three times. Her arm shot forward and punched him in the stomach; he reeled backwards with a grunt of pain. She stretched over him and wrapped her other arm around his neck and shoulders.

'You don't actually have any powers, so I doubt you realise this,' she drawled as her arm tightened around his neck and she tried to pull him down to the ground, 'but if you're going to fight us, you need to be a lot more… _flexible_.' She spun him, but he managed to swing a kick at her. She twisted her torso out of the way, and his foot barely clipped her hip. 'Also, black leather costume? Please try to live in the now.'

A seismic wave ripped through the ground. Paving stone cracked open, rippled up and down like a choppy sea. Ursa reappeared, about to lose her balance. She threw the Egg to Zuko and jumped away from the faultlines before hitting Shockwave's attack with a force-field.

Zuko managed five steps before Engima twisted the top of the fountain and struck him with a high-pressure spray of water. He yelped and the Egg slipped out of his grip and rolled on the wet ground.

'I've got it!' Azula yelled and released Boomerang with a dizzying spin, then raced towards the Egg, which was rolling faster and faster out of reach. Zuko was closing in on the other side, but she stretched her arms and her fingers wrapped around the artefact. She pulled it towards her and threw a look of triumph at Zuko—

—an arc of electricity struck him and he fell with a scream, spraying water as he writhed on the ground.

Azula whipped around. Boomerang was still holing his electro-shock device, readying another strike.

'Only I get to inflict hideous pain on my brother!' She stretched forward and splayed her hand into a thin, rubbery layer of flesh, slapping it onto Boomerang's head so hard the crack echoed across the plaza. 'The rest of you will have to stand in line.' He staggered back and tried to pull her hand off, but she spun him around and rammed him into Shockwave. He fell on her cape; she went down with a strangled yelp. 'You didn't see that coming, but just so you know, Quivers, that's why we don't wear capes.'

Before either mother or father could move in for the strike, though, Enigma levitated the slab of stone Shockwave and Boomerang were lying on. Azula stretched her body a hunded-fold and hit the slab like a giant drum skin, sending it spinning to the ground, where it crashed with a satisfying boom and a spurt of dust. She shrank her body back to size and pouched one arm around the Egg, ready to run back to the alley where mother had left the Stinger. Total annihilation would have been better, but just picturing their faces as they wallowed in shame and humili—

Something hot and slippery rained on her. She nearly laughed, not even bothering to look around. Did the super-idiots really think they were going to defeat her with some _warm oil_, for—

She tumbled to the ground, hitting the paving stones with a crack of pain. The Dragon Egg slipped out of her grip. She tried to scramble for it, but she was stuck in place, black goo holding her to the ground like a spiderfly on glue paper. She groaned in frustration and tried to stretch her body until her muscles burned, but the more she struggled, the more the goo trapped her. Her limbs felt like lead instead of rubber. Goo droplets sprayed on her face. Stone dust filled her nose and throat.

'I bet you didn't see that coming, Rubbers,' Shockwave's infuriating voice said above her.

'It's called the power Of Science,' Boomerang said. '_Learn it_.'

She couldn't even turn her head around to glare contemptuously at him.

A wave of white fire roared above her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ozai sweep up the Egg with one hand as he delivered another strike. 'It's called fear. Learn it.'

Stone shattered behind her, showering her with debris. She struggled even more furiously than before, her heart hammering her ribcage like a frightened bird, but the goo stuck the side of her head to the ground. Shockwave's vibrations filled the air again; Azula let out a cry as a chunk of paving flew widly towards her.

It smashed to powder. She rolled her one open eye as far as she could. Zuko stood above her like a rocky outcrop, a few strips of his uniform's fabric still clinging to him.

'I'll hold them. Grab her!' Ursa yelled. Boomerang raced towards him and Zuko batted him away, sending him crashing into a shop window. Roast turkey-ducks rolled out onto the street; a bucketful of spilled lizard-eels made a mad dash for freedom. 'Don't worry! We'll pay for all this stuff!' Boomerang yelled as he climbed out.

Zuko grabbed her one-handed and pulled her off the goo. She came free with a sound like a shoe sucked out of mud and promptly squirmed out of her brother's grip, trying to ignore the cold lump in her throat.

Of course, she'd never _actually_ doubted they'd help her out of her little momentary predicament, not that she wouldn't be able to find a way out herself if she _really_ had to. After all, the very first rule of the Evil League of Evil was "a super-villain will never leave another super-villain behind if there's nothing to be gained from it."

At their side mother had encased Shockwave and Enigma in a force-field, pouring all her energy into it as strike after strike hit it from inside, filling it with a storm of gravel and dust. Ursa's face was pearled with sweat. She was being slowly pushed backwards, her boots digging furrows on the ground. 'You two… ready?' she said through gritted teeth.

Ozai raced around the shield and covered it with waves of fire, making the air boil with heat. 'Drop it,' he yelled. A river of flame roared down. Ursa staggered back. 'Let's go!' she said.

The four of them raced towards the alley. Azula twisted her neck around; Enigma and Shockwave were clearing a path out of the dimming fire, alive but too far behind to catch them. She looked forward again as they neared the mouth of the alleyway. Father held the Egg firmly under one arm. Mother ran with one hand on her utility belt, ready to pull out the Stinger's remote. 'They'll never,' Azula panted triumphantly, 'catch u—'

Something whooshed past her so fast she spun out of balance and she had to stretch an arm to the ground to catch her fall. She straightened up, her breath coming in ragged puffs.

A cheerful voice rang out above. 'Looking for this?'

She looked up. A young boy sat cross-legged in mid-air, balancing the Golden Dragon Egg on one hand as if it were a kuai ball. A toothy grin split his face. Everything from his bald head to his orange-and-yellow costume complete with stylised arrows should make him look ridiculous, but instead he always looked as if he were privy to some joke of which you were the unwitting target. 'Thanks for stealing it, by the way!' he said as he executed a series of tumbles in mid-air, too fast to hit. 'Saved me the trouble of tracking it down and stealing it myself.'

'Airstrike!' father spat out, and flames burst out of his body with a roar. He propelled himself upwards, but Airstrike flew around the four of them in a super-sonic blur. The air grew to thin too breathe. Father dropped to the ground, his flames extinguished.

'Hey, don't tire yourself like that at your age,' Airstrike said jovially as he shot up into the air, tossing the Egg up and down as he flew. 'Wow, do you three look like idiots.'

Azula turned around. The Minutemen were approaching, every exposed inch of Enigma and Shockwave's skin covered with soot and sweat. The weren't moving towards Azula and her family, though. They were rushing towards Airstrike.

'Well, I'd love to stay and play,' Airstrike said, 'but I've got a toy to deliver to my pet bison. Yip yip, losers!' He sped away in a streak of yellow and orange followed by a sonic boom.

'After him!' Enigma said.

'What?' The air around Ozai swirled with heat. Flames raced up his arms, almost blue with fury.

Sirens began to wail in the distance. 'We'd better leave,' Ursa said.

'Yeah, piss off, you freaks!' someone shouted from a window above them. Ozai shot a fireball at the building, nearly blasting its fifth storey open. Screams rang out. Shutters snapped close.

Ursa grabbed his shoulder. The sirens were drawing closer. 'Come on. We'll come back later to make their children pay for them.'

They rushed into the alley and Ursa pressed the remote, making the Stinger spring to life. Reinforced glass slid up. Black and scarlet fins popped out.

'Where's Zuko?' father said as they piled into the vehicle.

A human hand rose from behind one of the rubbish barrels in the alleyway. 'Er… does anyone have an extra pair of pants?'

:=:

No one said anything as the Stinger glided through the canals, a small cloud of river silt rising in its wake. The occasional boat passed overhead, propeller noise muted by thick glass and fathoms of water.

Azula sunk into her seat, feeling as though she'd just been caught on camera hugging kittens and orphans. The aches and exhaustion from the fight in the plaza had finally caught up with her, turning her flesh and bones to curdled cow-hippo milk. Sweat pooled under her uniform, and the streaks of black goo were starting to fill the air with a rather unpleasant scent. She didn't even feel like tormenting Zuko, and judging from his expression, it would either be a very long time or a very short time before he put blades inside her dumplings again. She could see the ghostly outlines of her parents' faces on the glass: her mother's expression was a frosty blank as she drove, and her father seemed to be doing an eerily accurate impression of some stone sculpture entitled Man Looking Foreboding (and Displeased).

Her hand slid down to her utility belt and her fingers fell on something hard-edged. Oh yes—she had forgotten all about these. She dug into a compartment and fished out a handful of precious stones. The bluish light inside the Stinger made them look like they were covered in some strange, oily film.

'I managed to steal a few gems in the vault,' she said, trying to sound as triumphant and uncaring as ever.

Mother's expression didn't change. Father's frown managed to, somehow, grow deeper. No one said anything.

Azula put the gems back into the belt compartment. An almost perfectly spherical fish, bearing a third, milky eye, swam by one of the windows. Without changing its truculent expression, it opened its mouth and belched out something that had probably been some toxic effluvium at some point.

Yes. That seemed to sum it up.

:=:

No one spoke for the rest of the trip back to the Evil Lair. Azula couldn't help but think the moat looked less threatening, the spikes on the wall less sharp; even the clouds gathering around the lighting rods looked a little lighter than usual. Only the sign on the wall saying "Deliveries please use side door" looked like it always had.

Mother parked the Stinger in the warren of caves under the complex and the four of them remained silent as they changed back into civilian clothes and headed to the secret entrance into the library. The caves were full of the accumulated trophies of generations of super-villainy, but even those seemed to have lost their shine. The edge of the giant pendulum looked dull, the bottomless pit shallow, the giant crocosquid's teeth blunt. Father said nothing as they walked past the spot that had been reserved for the Golden Dragon Egg, but when his gaze smouldered, he didn't mix a metaphor.

A gaggle of minions was waiting for them as they walked into the library, surrounding them with a chorus of excited squeals. 'I'm sorry, minions,' Ursa told them. 'It has not been a good day for evil.' The minions sighed and looked dejected, insofar as lumps of pure malevolence (some of them wearing fetching pink goggles) could look dejected.

'But isn't a bad day for evil good—I mean, bad—' Zuko spluttered, then trailed off. Father turned towards him very, very slowly.

Azula rolled her eyes and grabbed her brother's hand. 'Come on. Let's go feed the piranha-sharks.'

:=:

For a while, Ozai stood in the library, silently looking at a spot where wall-scrolls were wedged between axes, meteor hammers, butterfly swords. Ursa approached him and made a mental note to tell the minions to pay particular attention to the weapons during their upkeep: some of the blood on the blades had nearly flaked off completely. Come to think of it, she was sure some of the gates in the lair weren't creaking as ominously as they should. She glanced over at one of scrolls, a swell of happy memories in her chest: it was from the time before Zuko and Azula were born—though perhaps "spawned" or "decanted" was a better word—when she had broken Ozai from prison for the first time and they had travelled the world for a while. There had been no worries, no responsibilities and, most important of all, no survivors.

But Ozai was instead contemplating the scroll from his last day at the Academy for the Unusually Gifted. His teenaged self stood at the forefront of the picture, smiling in his gold-sashed uniform. Of course, the flames and smoke rising from the school building behind him made it hard to make out details; Ursa's own graduation picture from the Institute of Mad Science showed the expressions of pure terror much more clearly. 'Am I not unspeakably evil enough, Ursa?' he said, finally, and half-turned towards her. 'Super-heroes escape unscathed. Some _normal_ dares to insult us. A revolting child mocks us. Is it possible… Is it possible that he's _worse_ than we are?' His expression made it clear that getting the words out was like biting into a razor-filled lemon.

Ursa tried to smile reassuringly. 'Nonsense. We'll soon be inflicting unspeakable torture on him.' She pondered this for a moment. 'Maybe with acid.' Ozai didn't reply. She edged a little closer to him and patted his arm. 'Don't beat yourself up, dear. That's my job.'

'I simply do not understand why we can't crush him. Haven't we lied, betrayed, looted, and slaughtered our way to the very top? Haven't we been spawned by two of the foulest lines to ever blight the face of the world? Haven't we beheld the unspeakably putrid maggots who feast on the wretched milk of human misery?' He paused and gave her a quizzical look.

'I think they're still feeding the piranha-sharks.'

'We shouldn't be out-villained by some giggling infant barely out of his evil diapers,' Ozai finished grumpily.

Ursa sighed. 'I heard he's actually much older than he looks. Some kind of stasis chamber.'

Ozai let out a derisive snort. She knew it wasn't directed at her. 'Look,' she said, her tone blunter than usual, 'he's hardly the first super-villain to try to supplant us. Let him think he's having his day in the death sun. He'll find out soon enough what kind of life our enemies have: short.' Her lips curled into a smile. She let the evil cackling to Ozai, its undisputed master, and she seldom put her full malice into her smiles. When she did, however, she knew the effect was deliciously skin-crawling. 'Though not nearly as short as he'll wish for.'

'Ah. Yes,' he said, his expression turning from gloomy to predatory. Even after decades of super-villainy, Ursa couldn't help but feel a thrill of excitement. He placed a hand on her shoulder. 'You never back down as it comes to evil, do you? It's one of your most wonderfully malevolent qualities.'

'Well, no, I don't,' Ursa said, feeling rather flattered. 'At least not since my first armed mob,' she added, and entwined her fingers with his. Maybe she should change into something else. Maybe with spikes. Her tone turned sultry. 'Why don't you and I go upstairs and try out the Death Ray again?'

Ozai brightened. 'I'll summon the minions.'

Everything always worked out for the best.

Or worst, rather.

:=:

The piranha-shark tanks were wedged between the cat-gator moat and the Corridor of Terror, and as he and his sister walked down it, Zuko couldn't help but look at the pictures covering the walls: great-grandfather Doctor Fate, founder of the Evil League of Evil (nominative imagination had never been one of their family's good—as it were—points). Great-grandfather Nightshade, the first super-villain to combine volcanoes and evil lairs. Grandmother Riot, who could not be contained in any prison and who had required the construction of the Asylum for the Criminally Super-gifted.

The greatest super-villains in history, looking down from portraits, news-sheets, and mug shots. Azula loved coming here—she had already decided which slice of wall would best display the dramatic pictures from her future first prison escape—but Zuko couldn't help but feel a little uncomfortable, the weight of his ancestors' gaze making his shoulders slump. He nearly tripped over a group of minions coming in the opposite direction.

'Have you ever wondered…' he started to say as soon as the minions' tittering drifted out of earshot, then fell silent. He was wearing a plain house robe, same as always—his clothes never lasted for very long, after all—but it felt uncomfortably tight. He looked down at the scarlet carpet as he walked around the traps hidden under the floor. Azula slid open the door standing between the stairs to the dungeon and the broom closet. They'd all tried to make it an evil broom closet, but without much success so far.

'Wondered about what?' she said as they stepped onto one of the catwalks stretching over an elaborate pool glowing an eerie blue. The air was full of the tang of salt. No, of course she hadn't wondered; she was as sleek and dreadful as the toothy shapes gliding in the water below them.

'What it would be like to… you know… not be like us,' he finished limply, and felt like slapping his own forehead.

Azula looked at him as she pulled one of the levers and a panel by the tank slid open, followed by a splash. For a moment, they both looked at the water, saying nothing. Feeding frenzies were always worth a look.

Finally, Azula spoke. 'Are you trying to strap me into your powers-switching machine again? I'm not falling for it, dum-dum. Besides, I managed to seal you up in that sensory-deprivation box. It'll take you a long time to catch up.'

'I would have caught up if you'd been just a little slower,' he grumbled. After he'd broken out of the box, he'd chased her for a while with one of the ray guns. _Isn't it nice when they play together?_ mother had said. 'Anyway, that's not the point,' he said as Azula moved on to another catwalk. Fins sliced through the water. 'Did you ever wonder about what it would be like to… _not_ be a super-villain?'

More piranha-shark chow splashed into the pool and vanished under the surface after a brief and pointless struggle. 'What do you mean?'

Zuko headed to the catwalk nearest the tank room's east side, as if moving would make the words as smooth as the sterile white walls. It didn't seem to work. 'I don't know. Like being… an accountant. Or something.'

Azula cocked her head. 'You mean like an evil accountant?'

'No, just—'

'So you're telling me you'd like to be a—' She paused in thought for a second, shook her head, and carried on. '—a… _non_-evil accountant?'

'Forget the accountant!'

His sister shrugged and stretched out an arm around her back to adjust her topknot. 'I'll be happy to. It's not like you're making the slightest bit of sense anyway.'

He looked down at the lights at the bottom of the tank. His hands tightened on the metal railing, and he had to force himself not to twist it. He knew he wasn't making any sense—no, it was worse than just not making any sense. He was sure the heaviness in the pit of his stomach would feel exactly the same if he came across photos of himself stopping crime, or if he broke one of the rules of the Evil League of Evil, even though they were actually more like guidelines, really. He thought back to the time when his power had first manifested. Azula hadn't even been three when she'd first stretched her arms a few feet to play with the little figurines hanging from tiny black nooses above her bed.

But he—he had been eight when he'd first done his… thing, and even then only because father had grown tired of waiting and drop-kicked him out of a fifth floor window. He'd promptly transformed in the last few feet down—he still remembered the oddly painless feeling of his body expanding inside-out, or possibly upside-down—and everything had been fine. Well, except for the pavement. And a bunch of parked cars. And his clothes.

But that was the issue, wasn't it? Everything had been fine. No, everybody had been _happy_. Even Azula had stopped her tantrum after mother had pulled her aside and had said in a scolding tone that she and father were always willing to drop-kick her out of a window, but today it was her brother's special day. He wondered how things would have been like if he'd been born into a family of normals and had transformed for the first time while they were drinking tea and talking about the weather, or whatever it was regular people did. Maybe they would have been open-minded and let him live in a basement or something, or ask him—

_piss off you freaks_

—if he had tried _not_ turning into a hideous monster, no doubt in an encouraging tone of voice.

So why did he sometimes feel like he was dragging along some hot, leaden cloak even he couldn't burst through?

'Just forget about it,' he snapped. 'Not that you'd ever get it, being such a perfect super-villain.'

Azula sighed dramatically. 'Why, thank you for acknowledging my obvious superiority. I do try. Like now.' Before he could react, her arm shot out past him and yanked one of the levers behind him. His catwalk promptly pitched him a pool frothy with teeth and ribbons of blood. The water hit him like a slap, stung his throat and eyes. Something slid past him and scurried away.

He stood up in the tank, spilling a small wave onto the floor. 'Great,' he rumbled, and picked up a fragment of clothing with fingertips that were now the size of rice bowls.

A peal of laughter rang out and Zuko turned around in time to see Azula bounce over the puddle. 'That was fun,' she said as she landed, then stared intently at what, for lack of a better word, could be called his face. He ignored her at first—everybody stared at him when he powered up—then she spoke. 'Er… you have something on your… One of the little ones…'

He sniffed. A small piranha-shark flopped onto the water, flapped its fins rather indignantly, and darted away.

'You should have seen yourself,' Azula said with a sharp little snort. 'Come on. You can laugh. It's _funny_.'

Zuko gave her a look so old-fashioned it was probably right next to fossilised bones, then stepped over to the side of the tank and climbed out. Azula ignored him, only stretching away to avoid the wave of water he spilled out. The floor groaned under him as he sat down, his legs still in the pool, looking like two enormous barnacle-encrusted pilings.

'Aren't you going to change?' Azula said.

A shrug passed through him like a tectonic movement. There hardly seemed to be a point.

'Suit yourself. No pun intended,' she added sharply, and turned away. In the pool, the water was nearly smooth again. He resisted the urge to sway his legs; he'd probably crack the side of the tank wide open.

'Did you mean it, or were you just mocking them?' Zuko said without turning back to face his sister.

There was a second of silence.

'Did I mean what?'

'When you said that only you got to inflict hideous pain on me.'

Even without looking, he knew the corners of her mouth had curled into a smirk. 'I'm always willing to inflict hideous pain on you, dum-dum.'

_That's not what I meant_, he thought, but didn't say it. The feeling was mutual, anyway.

Only instead of hearing his sister walk away with a parting quip, footsteps sloshed towards him. He twisted—or landslided, rather—around; the pool edge groaned underneath him. Azula couldn't do much to him while he was in this… state, but it always paid to be prepared.

Azula didn't, however, look like she was readying something inventively awful. Her face was blank, and if she'd been anyone else at all, he would have been sure he saw a flicker of hesitation in her eyes. Then she spoke and the illusion vanished. '_Of course_ I _meant it_, Zu-Zu. Believe it or not, I actually think family means something. It just isn't the same thing if some… outsider gets to kill you, is it? Especially one of those goody-two-shoes super-idiots,' she added with a shudder of disgust. 'I mean, look at Uncle Iroh. Do you think dad would let anyone else send us explosive packages?'

'Hmph,' he rumbled, but hard as it was to admit it, she had a point. That had been such a good time.

'Besides,' Azula said as she propped herself against his leg like someone lounging casually against a stone wall, 'I may have said some things in part because—' She turned her head towards the water, where a dark shape glided below the surface. 'Well, because, deep down, I may have been just a little bit…' Her voice narrowed to silence.

He resisted an urge to prod her into finishing. A shrug of his leg would probably bounce her into the pool, and tempting as that was, he couldn't help but feel curious about what she was going to say.

'Jealous,' she whispered.

That, he hadn't expected.

'Whatever,' he said after a few seconds had trickled by. This time he did shrug; Azula edged away, but her gaze remained fastened on the pool. Zuko was sure that if she'd been their father, the air around her would be curling with heat, and the ends of her hair would start smoking.

'It's not that I'm complaining, of course,' she added with a quick turn of her head, and began studying her fingernails. 'I am obviously superior in every single dimension of super-villainy. But—' She paused, glared at him. For a moment he wondered if he had another piranha-shark stuck to his face, but even he would probably have noticed by now.

Then she threw her hands up and rolled her eyes. 'Oh, fine! I am jealous of your super-power. There.' Her tone cooled. 'Try not to crow about it for too long. I'd hate to have to rush the schedule of the next horrible thing I'm going to do to you.' She didn't sound like she'd hate it in the slightest.

'Really?' he blurted out, before he could stop himself. Her expression sharpened, ready with mockery, then—another surprise—softened.

It was almost as disturbing as one of mother's evil smiles.

'You really haven't noticed? I must be an even better actor than I thought,' she added with a mechanic touch of superiority, then went on. 'I thought for sure you'd have realised it when you finally got to use your power for evil. It just didn't seem fair that _you_ would turn out to have the best power in the family.'

'Ending up naked everywhere isn't the best power in the family,' he growled, unable to keep a note of annoyance off his voice. That he hadn't noticed any of what Azula was telling him seemed somehow unfair, as if he were the only person carrying a large parasol on the one day it rained gold. It was a childish thought, he knew, but knowing didn't make it any better.

His sister punched his leg and her arm bounced back several yards. 'Of course your power is the best, dum-dum,' she said as she shrunk her arm back into place. 'See what I mean? I bet you didn't feel this. I bet you didn't feel anything even when I buried you under that avalanche.'

'That's not true! It stung a little,' he added defensively.

She stretched her legs until she was at eye-level with him. 'Oh, Zu-Zu. Do you have any idea how hard it is to try to torment a brother who can turn into a giant, super-strong, invulnerable…'

'… thing,' he finished.

'I was going to go with "abomination", but that's the whole point, isn't it? Every possible choice just positively drips with super-villainy. You don't even have to try. Not that it's any kind of challenge for someone like me, of course, but sometimes I wish I didn't have to, oh, make balloon animals for small children so I can pop them afterwards. Just show up and change.' She fell silent for a while, swaying a little on her stretched-up legs as she stared at the water. Then she glanced back at him and a flush of anger or embarrassment—no, this was Azula, it was almost certainly anger—spread through her face. 'You're not going to blab about this, are you?'

'No,' he grunted.

Her eyes narrowed. 'Are you lying?'

He wanted to sigh, but he was sure it would come out as some sort of small eruption. 'No.'

'You're lying,' she said as she shrank back to her regular size, but she sounded pleased rather than annoyed. 'That's all right. That's what family is all about, after all. Oh, and coming from the same strand of horribly mutated DNA.'

'Don't forget the explosive packages,' he added, and realised, as his sister let out a giggle like bright, poisoned candy, that he actually… did not mind this. He didn't know if Azula was right about his power—father always said the octo-bears were always more rabid in a rival's cage—but he thought that even though she was, well, Azula, she wasn't wrong about family. About them.

He looked at the pestiferous little sister who'd always done her utmost to drive him crazy ever since mother and father had shown his toddler self a small loaf of flesh wrapped in a blanket covered in biohazard stickers and she'd promptly thrown up on him, then followed it with a malevolent little gurgle.

But that was the whole point, wasn't it? She would stir some new deadly poison into his rice porridge, he'd retaliate by switching her hair oil with some of the flesh-eating acid the minions had cooked up in the lab, and on it would go until one of them either declared victory or ran out of places in which to set traps…

… Only nobody else got to do it. He thought back to Azula stuck to the ground, about to get hit by a half-ton chunk of stone. The cold lurch inside him at the realisation that his sister was about to get hurt, maybe killed, and he wasn't going to be the one to do it. They were the Fearsome Four. He'd never really thought like this about the second half of the name.

It was almost heart-warming, or would be, if he actually had a heart. Or warm blood.

Or indeed blood of any kind.

Maybe he had some kind of sludge circulating around.

Azula's arm stretched out and settled around what could charitably be called his shoulders.

'What are you doing?' he said.

'Being… sisterly, dum-dum.'

'You're trying to put something on me, aren't you?'

She withdrew her arm and slid the small explosive back into her pocket. 'Of course I was.'

'That's all right. I already put something in your—' He paused. 'Never mind.'

She frowned. 'What?'

'Nothing.' He looked back at the pool.

She stretched up and around to face him, brow furrowing and eyes flashing. 'What did you _do_?'

'_Nothing_,' he repeated, but of course Azula didn't believe him; she let out a cry of frustration as she snapped back into shape.

He smiled. He didn't smile a lot, and never at all in this form, so he was sure it must look like a mountain crevasse, but he couldn't help himself.

It felt good to be bad.

* * *

><p>++The End++<p>

* * *

><p><strong>Author's NoteDisclaimer:** So I took this family and turned them all into super-villains, and the biggest difference is that they're now happy and functional. Sad, isn't it? ;) (But can you imagine? "Father, I won't fight you! Not in such a poorly-appointed arena! There aren't even any acid tanks!" "My own mother thought I was a monster—isn't it _wonderful_?" (Also, the rest of that AU Ozai vs Zuko duel, courtesy of **muffinbitch**: Zuko: Where are the laser-sharks? It's like you don't even mean it! Ozai: Of course I mean it, son! What if I bring in some rabid octo-bears?)) True, Zuko is still doing the equivalent of, as **muffinbitch** put it, locking himself in his room listening to The Cure and seething about how no one understands him, but he's a teenager and also Zuko, and deep down he probably loves every minute. Anyway, here are the sources of the lines/concepts I borrowed for the story:

The title, the minions, some of the Evil Lair's aesthetics, the notion of giving a child a balloon animal just to pop it, and the plot-line with the rivalry between older villains and a younger, slicker villain all come from _Despicable Me_. The line "Family is about (…) coming from the same strand of horribly mutated DNA" is paraphrased from one of the minions training videos in the _Despicable Me_ DVD extras.

"I could just eat you alive… but no, you're still too young."; "no worries, no responsibilities, and, most important of all, no survivors"; and "Don't beat yourself up, dear. That's my job." come (with some alterations) from some of Morticia Addams' lines in the _Addams Family_ film series. Conversely, some of Ozai's lines in their scene together are very loosely borrowed from some of Gomez Addams' lines in the same movies. The family's whole ethos and relationships with each other owe a fair bit to the Addams Family too.

The Fearsome Four's name and powers are a loose parody of the Fantastic Four, with Ozai/Flashpoint = the Human Torch, Ursa/Phantom = Invisible Woman and Azula/Slingshot = Mr Fantastic. Zuko is, of course, The Thing.

Enigma, Shockwave, Boomerang, and Airstrike's (who are, of course, Katara, Toph, Sokka, and Aang) costumes, powers, and mask names are an amalgam of their canon powers/characteristics and a number of comics super-heroes/super-villains. (Obviously, the whole fic is an homage to super-hero comics and movies in terms of, well, everything, really. ;))

"You need to be a lot more flexible" comes from the film _The Incredibles_. Azula's line about capes is inspired by the same film, though it isn't a direct quote (for an additional reason as to why capes are sooo last year, see also Dollar Bill from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' _Watchmen_).

"Please try to live in the now" comes from _Buffy: the Vampire Slayer_. I doubt Boomerang/Sokka looks like DeBarge, mind you.

The bit with someone calling Ozai & co freaks was inspired by a similar scene in the second _Hellboy_ movie. (Of course, Hellboy is played by Sozin's VA. Six degrees of separation and all that.)

The Evil League of Evil comes from _Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog_, and its rules/guidelines are a reference to the Pirate Code in the _Pirates of the Caribbean_ movie series.

I also note without any surprise whatsoever that, no matter the generation, the time, the setting, the characters, or the circumstances, this family's travails always involve, sooner or later, a lack of pants.


	5. Switch: A Force That Gives Us Meaning

_**Switch:**_ A quartet of _Avatar: the Last Airbender_ AU fics, each exploring what could have happened if a character had been born in a nation other than their canon one. Each story is its own separate AU and stands completely on its own, but the first two stories, _A Force That Gives Us Meaning_ and _Stone Heart_, do parallel each other to some extent and probably work best when read together.

* * *

><p><strong>Switch: i. A Force That Gives Us Meaning<strong>

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom:** _Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Characters/Pairing(s):** Katara, Sokka, Hakoda, Kya, Kanna; gen

**Rating:** T

**Summary:** Fire Nation!Katara AU. At four, she found out she was the only firebender in her family. By ten, she was the most advanced bender in her whole class. Now that she is fourteen, she is sure that the coming school test is the last hurdle before she can finally serve her country and her Fire Lord. After all, hers is the greatest nation in the world… isn't it? Written for **au_bigbang** 2012.

**Warnings:** There is nothing depicted in the story that would go above a T rating. However, this is told from the PoV of a character who has swallowed a disturbing ideology hook, line, and sinker, so the story is incredibly creepy (but hopefully, creepy in a "psychological horror/Tomorrow Belongs To Me" way, rather than in a "lurking at a bus station in a trenchcoat" way ;)). Detailed spoiler-y warnings (scrambled, paste into rot13dotcom to read): gnyx bs zragny vyyarff naq gur fgvtzn fheebhaqvat vg, qvffvqragf orvat qenttrq bss ol gur frperg cbyvpr.

**Word Count:** 9,900

**Author's Notes:** The title comes from the Chris Hedges book _War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning_. Also, while all the stories in the _Switch_ quartet are their own separate AU and stand on their own completely, this story and _Stone Heart_ parallel each other in many ways, so they probably work best when read together. Many thanks to the wonderful **greedyslayer** for the beta.

* * *

><p><strong>Switch: A Force That Gives Us Meaning<strong>

* * *

><p>Firebenders surrounded her. Kara focused on the first one and dropped into the same stance, then spun and stepped across the floor. Fire Lily, Tigerdillo, Second Dragon, Wolfbat. Punch, swing, block, side-step. She was lightning above the water, white fire in the night. She was—<p>

'… on _my_ side of the room.'

Her body jerked to a standstill. Lightning, white fire, and the Fire Lord's applause all winked out. She was in her bedroom, wearing half her school uniform and a pair of breeches, her feet bare on the floorboards. The cat lay on a sunbeamed mat, looking at her with a distinctly unimpressed expression.

'Am not,' she said. She wasn't sure about what Sou was even saying, but he was her brother and there was only one possible response.

'Sure you are,' Sou said, and lowered his drawing pad so he could point at an invisible line running between the two beds. 'That's _your_ half. This is _my_ half.' He made it sound as if he were talking about a border drawn up in barbwire and guarded by cannons.

'It's firebending,' she said, and remained rooted to the same spot. 'Not tinybending. I kinda need the space.'

Sou propped his pad up again and picked up his charcoal pencil. 'You're just freaking out because you think there's going to be a test.'

'There _is_ going to be a test.' She thought of Nuan, rushing into the school's lunch room and taking her seat just seconds before the server walked by with a big pot of pepper noodles and began ladling them into their bowls. A few strands of hair had come loose from Nuan's topknot and her face was glowing with heat from racing into the room, but when the server walked past, Nuan gave her one of her polished gold smiles and the frown on the woman's face receded. 'Where were you?' Kara whispered after they'd all been served.

'I dropped my bag, but that's not the point.' She leaned forward and her voice dwindled to a whisper. Everybody else drew closer in a conspiratorial huddle. 'While I was picking up my stuff, I heard two teachers talking. They couldn't see me, so I guess they thought they were alone. One of them was Ms Kang for sure, the other I think was that weird old guy who teaches history to the upper levels. You know, the one with…' Kara felt herself grow stiff with impatience, the steam rising from her bowl teasing her nose. There was no point in trying to rush Nuan, though, and she knew it. When her friend was telling something, she would keep going until the little red-eyed pin she always wore in her hair was practically trembling with excitement. 'They were talking about tomorrow's test.'

'What test?' Rai said from the other side of the table. 'Our exams aren't until—'

'It's not a regular exam,' Nuan had said with a pointed sigh. 'It's a _special_ test. We're obviously not supposed to know about it until it happens.'

'Besides,' Kara said, and flopped unceremoniously onto her brother's bed, ignoring his protest, 'if there is no test, how come you're studying?' She picked up the book lying open by Sou's side and flipped through it. Schematics filled the pages, machine entrails dissected and labelled. When they'd been little, her brother had decided to pull apart all of their clockwork toys. More importantly, he'd then put them all back together, and almost all of them had still worked.

'_Please_,' he said, and turned his drawing towards her. 'I am _inventing_.'

She looked at the drawing for a few moments. 'Is it a… shark-squid?'

He hit her arm with the pad. 'It's a boat that goes underwater. I call it the… Underwater… Boat.'

'Name still needs some work,' she said. He stuck out her tongue at her.

Silence. Sou's pencil hovered above the paper. The air around them cooled. Kara looked at her hands, where a few straggler drops of sweat still pearled the brown skin. 'What if we don't pass?' she said, and raised her eyes back to her brother. 'What if… what if we—if I mess things up and then I'm not allowed to enlist?' She pictured herself standing at a recruiting post, her papers being returned to her with a bile-green stamp saying 'denied', mocking gazes heavy on her skin like lumps of fired-up coal. She pictured herself at the other end of the world, victory banners all around her, Fire Lord Ozai himself telling her to rise. She had seen his face hundreds of times, of course—there was even a picture above the shrine in the parlour's alcove—but whenever she pictured him in person, his face was always a brilliant, blinding sunburst. 'This is our moment of greatest triumph,' the fire made flesh was telling her. 'The world is finally united into the greatest, most prosperous empire in history. An endless era of peace and abundance is at hand. I wish to reward you for your part in bringing it about, citizen Kara.' Then someone whispered, and the sun went dark with anger. 'I'm afraid there has been a grave mistake. You are not supposed to be here, citizen.' The word had an entirely different ring this time. She saw mother's face, clouded with disappointment. 'Oh dear,' Kya said, and shook her head.

Fire flashed inside the room's lanterns with a whoosh and a whiff of phosphorus. Sou hit her with the pad again. 'Hey, knock it off,' he said.

'Sorry.' Behind the glass, the flames dimmed to a sedate red.

'Of course we'll be allowed to enlist,' Sou grumbled.

She looked back at her brother's face, at the eyes that were the exact same shade of amber as hers. After a few seconds she looked away, to the spot on the red coverlet where the Mechanists' Corps book lay open. 'Yeah, you're probably right,' she said. 'Well, you're right as it comes to me, anyway.'

'Oh please. The problem with you benders is that you have no imagination.' He puffed up his chest, which looked distinctly hard to do while lying down on a bunch of cushions. 'If I got denied, which I wouldn't be, but if I did, I'd just… come up with a new identity and use that to enlist.'

She thought of the serials they both read. At the moment they were waiting for the next instalment of _Pirates of the Southern Seas_. 'You mean like with a fake name and stuff?'

'Sure. I could call myself, I don't know, Wang… Fire,' he added.

'Wang Fire,' she repeated in her flattest tone.

Sou bristled. 'Well, not _just_ a fake name. I'd obviously also wear a moustache and a beard and all that.'

Kara got up and padded across the floor to collect the stiff cardboard rectangles with pictures of firebending forms she'd propped up all over the room. 'So if I get denied all I need is a felt moustache and a name change to Ms Fire. Sounds like a plan.' She picked up the picture showing a green-eyed man in colonial dress doing the Red Lotus Hand Form and stepped over to the chest of drawers to pick up the last one.

'Try Sapphire Fire instead,' Sou said. 'It'll probably work better. No, wait—_Ruby_ Fire.'

'I'll get right on that,' she muttered, her focus wholly on the last picture. Out of all her firebending cards, this was her favourite. It wasn't the form itself that she particularly cared for—it involved a side-step punch that was hard to master and looked impressive but was more flash than substance—but the way the woman looked so much like her. Same cheekbones, same dark skin gleaming under the flames like polished emberwood. They both had the blood of the First Flame, the Sun Warriors and the other peoples who had been the only inhabitants of the forest-covered archipelago that would one day be the Fire Nation until settlers had come from the East in their small, fragile ships. In a nod to her heritage, the woman wore a bracelet of elaborately carved gold. At school, they had been taught that the First Flame had had various elaborate currency systems involving things like rare shells and knotted bead strings. Gold, they had considered valueless; they had bedecked themselves with it, used it to decorate their buildings. Kara pictured a pyramid, built four thousand years before her birth, the sculpted stone tipped with gold. A tropical canopy surrounded it, and in the night sky, just like in the firebending card, the Mantabird constellation blazed.

She looked at her brother. 'Do you really think—' she began, but Grandmama's voice rang out, calling them to come help with dinner.

:=:

'Kara?'

She blinked, looked up from the braised fish with curried caulitato in her bowl to her mother's expectant face. The scent of cumin, ginger, and chillies tickled her nose. 'I'm sorry?'

Kya looked amused. 'I was just asking you about the mechanical loom. What do you think of the new fabric?'

Kara thought back to the conversation she'd had with her parents as they had waited for the vegetables to finish boiling. All she could recall right now was scarlet cloth unfurling and billowing as mother shook it free. Absurdly, a half-remembered history lesson floated up, the teacher droning on about how when the eastern settlers had first set eyes on the islands, they had seen a thick forest with trunks so scarlet they had imagined the land to be on fire—in reality, it was only the tint of the wood, covered in the secretions of crimson beetles, where the first true scarlet dye had come from. A perfect red.

'I, er—'

'Don't mind her, she's too busy worrying about tomorrow's test,' Sou said as he got up to pile up more food on his bowl. As soon as he began to sit back down, he let out a yelp and shot back up; somehow, the wobbling tower of food didn't spill all over the table. On the cushion, the cat—they had called him Mr Chao due to his resemblance to a bespectacled teacher, but the human version had never managed the same amount of malevolence—sheathed his claws again and settled back with a smug feline grin. All around the table, laughter was suppressed into coughs. 'You just _love_ getting in my personal space, don't you?' Sou said.

Mr Chao's smugness increased. Kara drowned her laughter in a gulp of juice.

'It's not funny at all,' Sou said, as he sat on a different cushion.

'Opinions differ,' Kara said, and exchanged a winking glance with her father.

'So what's this about a test?' Grandmama said, and Kara felt herself cool.

'Yes, I don't recall hearing about a test,' mother said. There was a tinkle of glazed pottery as she spooned some of the chilli paste onto her fish. Of course mother would be searching her memory for any mention of the test. Mother was a genius: she could calculate even the most complicated things in her head much faster than anyone could flick the beads of an abacus, and she remembered _everything_, down to the last scrap of fabric in the workshop. She kept track of Kara and Sou's lessons and progress so accurately she knew when they needed more writing paper or more pots of ink even before they did.

Sou pulled a chunk of caulitato from his wobbling pile, as if it were one of those puzzle games in which you had to pull out the right piece without it all coming apart. 'That's because we weren't told about it. One of Kara's friends has her convinced there will be some kind of surprise test tomorrow.'

'Sounds… odd,' father said.

Sou finished chewing. 'That's what I keep telling her.'

'You'll both do fine,' Grandmama said, and took a sip of her tea. Steam curling around her chin. 'You always do.'

'What if it's a special test?' Kara said, and poked at the food in her bowl with the tips of her chopsticks. She had eaten a few bites at the start of dinner, but right now they sat in her belly like a ball of lead. 'What if…'

'She thinks she won't be allowed to enlist,' Sou said, and dropped a piece of fish towards Mr Chao, who promptly swiped it into his mouth.

Mother and father exchanged a glance. 'I don't think you'll have to worry about that until you're sixteen,' Hakou said.

'Eleven months for me,' Sou said, with an audible swell of pride. Once he turned sixteen his name would be added to the neighbourhood's Lottery, but Kara was sure he wouldn't wait for the next draw.

'You'll probably take so long training I'll be able to catch up,' Kara said.

Sou took an unhurried sip of his juice. 'I'll save you a spot at the front. Of course, by the time you get there it will all be over.'

Kara rammed his shin with her foot. He rammed hers back.

Father cleared his throat, and Kara looked up. Hakou had only really ever raised his voice when she had—mostly accidentally—set Sou's bedclothes on fire when they were little kids. When he spoke, she listened. 'Son, I had thought you'd want to join the Mechanists' Corps.'

'Sure, but I can't just stay here and come up with stuff. If I come up with something to, I don't know, bring down the walls of Ba Sing Se, I want to be there to use it.'

'What kind of thing?' Kara said.

Sou shrugged. 'I don't know, like a giant drill, or something. The point—'

'How would that work?'

'Steam power and centripetal force.' His expression turned smug. 'I'll explain it later.'

She let out an exaggerated sigh. 'I didn't mean how it would work, I meant how it would _work_. How would you—'

'Children, can we set the giant drills aside?' mother said.

'Depends on their size,' Kara heard Sou mutter under his breath, but her attention was on her parents. The clinking of dinnerware had stopped. There was a fluttery sound from the mynah-parrot in the perch in the corner. The lead ball in Kara's stomach bobbed up, then plunged down again. She was sure she could even hear the susurrus of the oil lamps.

'We were hoping you would serve in the colonies,' father said, his eyes on Kara, before he turned to Sou, 'and you'd stay here with the War Ministry.'

Kara exchanged a look with her brother. 'What about the front?' Sou said.

'It—' Mother cleared her throat, took a sip of fire wine, resumed. 'Once you've both served your three years, then you'll have the right training, the right experience…'

Almost two years until she turned sixteen. Then another three years after that. It felt like an eternity, stretching barren ahead of her.

'I don't want to stay here,' Sou said, then paused. 'Wait, that came out wrong. I mean, I don't want to stay at the Ministry just drawing things.' His hand balled into a fist. 'I want to be a warrior.'

A sudden image, startling in its vividness: her brother wearing a felt beard, waving a sword in front of a banner reading WANG FIRE, HERO OF THE FIRE NATION. She had to bite her tongue so hard her mouth filled with pain and the taste of rust, and her chest shuddered until her ribs ached. She managed to contain her laughter; she was sure that if any of it spilled out, she wouldn't stop until she was on the floor and her stomach and chest hurt, any amusement long gone.

'Of course, but don't you want to use your talents?' mother said. A smile twitched in her lips. 'Remember that one time when we took you to the workshop and you were halfway through removing all the bolts in one of the looms before—'

'It worked better when it was put back together,' Sou began, but Kara elbowed him into silence. Insight trickled inside her, cold and slippery like wet season rain. Her eyes darted from her mother to her father.

'We'll be fine,' she said. 'In the front, I mean.' Of course it was _dangerous_. It was a war. People died, hacked by blades or crushed by boulders. If there were no danger, then Sou would not have been able to annoy her when they were little by jumping at her from under a blanket or from behind a screen, making cat-owl noises and telling her the dirt-people were coming for her, to crush her, suffocate her, bury her under a landslide… Then mother would ask them if they _really_ had to do this on a rest day, and tell Sou not to say "dirt-people"—they were supposed to be _helping_ those people, after all—and father would end up taking them under each arm like a pair of squealing pig-chicks and carry them outside. She blinked the memory away; now she had more than a child's understanding, after all.

'Of course you'd be fine,' Grandmama said. Throughout the whole exchange she had continued making her way through her bowl and sipping her tea at regular intervals. 'You're both smart, you have your skills, Kara has her firebending…' She popped a sliver of tomato-carrot in her mouth, chewed it, carried on. 'But if you go outside in harsh weather, you take a parasol with you.'

'But—don't you _want_ us to go?' Kara said. Her stomach cramped with—

_fear_

—something that had nothing to do with the food. Her gaze moved from her grandmother to her father, then her mother. Their faces—beloved, familiar—were nonchalant, as if they were discussing nothing more important than the weather, but Kara could see a shadow twitch in the corner of her mother's lips, and her father had the same expression of forced reassurance he'd worn when she'd broken her ankle after falling off the big cypress. Anger unfurled inside her, not the clean-edged thing that powered her strongest firebending, but something that was thick on her tongue and bubbled in her chest. 'Don't you want us to do our—duty?'

The last word spilled out in a fumble. It wasn't duty, not really. It was being not even four and laughing and clapping while sparks flew around her hands like fireflies. It was being eleven and have her fire, which had been a pale orange until then, turn a dazzling white. It was living in a golden city with shops and the big market and libraries, and walking around, freely and alone, under protection of a great shield of laws. It was train engines and clockwork soldiers and wooden dragon-moose behind the gleaming glass of a shop window. It was the metal fingers of the mechanical looms in her parents' workshop and fabric smooth like freshly-combed hair. It was fireworks blooming in the sky in the New Year festival and going to the play and having Grandmama shush them as she and Sou annoyed each other in their balcony seats and then stopping on the way home for chilli chocolate, the bittersweet steam turning the glass goblets white.

She owed it all that much.

'That's not even in question,' father said. 'But it's also our duty to guide you.'

Sou protested. 'But I'm almost old enough—'

'Children.' Mother lifted a finger for one instant. Her voice didn't rise, but she was using the tone that ended all discussions. Kara had always heard that the Fire Lord was the father or mother of the Fire Nation; sometimes she understood it completely. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Sou open his mouth, close it. She elbowed him nonetheless. 'We'll talk about this some other time,' mother said.

Kara lowered her head and poked at her curried vegetables, most of her appetite gone.

:=:

A half-eaten apple-mango sat in her hand, the fruit's skin looking like red lacquer even in the sunless dusk. The dinner conversation still swirled in her mind, but by now it had been partly pushed away by a familiar little lump, like a phantom pebble in her shoe. She was accustomed to it. Her brother seemed to take every test, every challenge, in stride; she would feel a knot of ice grow and grow in her belly all the way through the exercise, then have a brief respite until it was time to wait for the results. The last time they'd both had a big examination, she had stayed up so late studying, Uncle Bai had threatened to put a fire squid in her bed if she didn't put out the light _right now_. Sou had already been asleep for the past few hours, snoring softly and placidly in his bed.

After the exam, all she'd been able to think about was how she'd scribbled so furiously her characters had almost started running into each other, like cats with twinned tails, and how many points she would be docked for poor calligraphy. Sou, who was a year ahead of her, had stretched, yawned, and said 'Well, that was kinda hard, but I thought it was going to be way worse.' She'd resented his grin all the way home.

A footfall sounded on the porch. Her gaze remained fastened on the low wall encircling the garden, the big trees—

_murder tree is such a_ peculiar _name_

—and the rows of houses, the bulk of the bakery at the end of the street. If she drew a deep breath she was sure she would be able to smell the ocean under the warm magnolia air.

'Hey, little platypus-bear.'

'Hey, father platypus-bear.'

Her father chuckled. Kara wasn't sure if she should, so she just took another bite of her apple-mango as Hakou sat down on the step beside her. When she was a kid she had kept asking for real apples, like the ones in the stories, until dad had finally caved in and bought her the expensive treat that had to be grown in special cold houses. It had tasted a bit mealy.

'Are you still upset?' he said.

'I'm not upset, dad,' she snapped, then fell silent; that hadn't come out quite right. 'OK, I see your point.'

He smiled at that, but she could tell it wasn't at her expense. Above them the sky had deepened to indigo and in the streets the lamplighters had begun their rounds. Crickets droned.

'It's just that…' she trailed off, looked down at the bitten flesh of the apple-mango.

'No, I understand,' father said. He turned to her, put his hand on her shoulder. The streetlamp nearest to them winked to life. Even with the foliage in the way, it cast a faint orange sheen on his face and hair. 'We all have obligations. And I was fourteen once.' He withdrew his hand. 'I know it sounds hard to believe.'

She smiled, then felt it fade and looked down at the ground. Her toe nudged a pebble. 'I know, dad, but—' She threw her free hand up. 'My firebending. I am so good.' Her face grew hot, but still the words tumbled out. 'I am the best in my class, really. Even Ms Kang says so, I heard her say I should be in a more advanced class. Two years ahead, at least. She even said I am ready to try making lightning. Lightning! I—' Her mouth closed.

'I know how good you are,' he said.

Only he _couldn't_ know. How her palms would become slick with sweat as she waited her turn—why couldn't she have a name that was at the _start_ of the list?—to be tested on her forms and drills, how the knot inside her tightened, her joints turned rubbery. And then—then it would be her turn and everything would melt in a plume of white flame. She was a phoenix. She was lightning. When she was done her heart was always steady, and the sweat pearling her skin was a silvery sheen of triumph.

'Then you know I have to volunteer to go out there. I can't just stay in the Homeland Defence Force or in the colonies,' she said. 'I can't let it go to waste!'

'I know, I know.' In the encroaching night her father's eyes looked black. 'And of course you will. But…'

He felt silent, the word hanging moth-like between them. Kara waited for him to speak again and when the silence stretched on she realised with a startle that he was afraid. She had seen him afraid before, of course—she'd seen him worried, she'd seen him sick. She wasn't a little child, still convinced that her parents were all-powerful spirits. But there was something new here, something that made the wooden step underneath her and the night air on her skin feel suddenly uncomfortable. It was a bit like the time when she'd first realised that the monsters and dragons in plays weren't real, just fabric and cardboard animated by stagehands.

'I'll be OK, dad,' she said. She was looking at the ground again, but she edged just a fraction closer to him, until she could sense the cloud of heat coming from his body. If she focused, she'd feel the scent of sawdust and mineral oil that always clung to his clothes after a day at the workshop and always tugged at a flesh memory of being snuggled in his arms. 'You won't have to worry about us. You know I'll be careful. We both will.'

'I know you will,' he said, and brushed her hair away from her shoulder. 'It's not that. Your grandfather—my father was in the front.'

He was no longer looking at her, and for a second she was sure she had misheard.

'I… didn't know that.'

'He put his medals in a box in the attic,' father went on. He kept staring straight ahead, and so after a moment Kara looked in the same direction. All she could see was the screen of branches and leaves at the end of the garden, the bulk of their neighbours' house. In the far horizon the dead volcano reared into the sky, darker still than the night. Maybe he was looking at that. She would, sometimes.

It was where the Fire Lord lived, after all.

'I think he wanted to forget about it. He came back… wrong.'

Kara had barely known that grandfather. He was black and white behind a rope of incense smoke, a picture in the family shrine. She tried searching for a childhood memory of an old man with a limp, or perhaps an arm that no longer worked.

'Not in his body, not really,' father said, and the would-be memory winked out. Hakou tapped his forehead with one finger. 'Wrong up here.'

He didn't seem to be waiting for a reply, so she said nothing.

'He was another man when he returned. A different man. He would shout, you know, sometimes. But most of the time he'd be dead quiet. Real quiet, the kind you can't break. And sleep all the time, during the day. Then one day—' He turned to her and his tone changed, a lid snapped down on his memories. 'It doesn't matter. He was ill.'

_What doesn't matter?_ She swallowed, managed to push out a sentence. 'I'm sorry.' The words dropped down with all the graciousness of a brick. When her father had said grandfather's mind was—_wrong_—she had thought he'd been mad, this man who was in her blood but whom she'd never met. But father had said nothing about him hearing things, or seeing things that weren't there, or thinking he was some long-dead Fire Lord. She had heard of people being afraid of serving, and even deserting in their cowardice, but she had never heard of this kind of illness. Maybe her grandfather had caught some ancient, swamp-water sickness they had long since got rid of in the homeland.

'It's all right, little platypus-bear,' he said, and put an arm around her, but the old term of endearment didn't have the usual ring to it. For a moment there her—

_stranger_

—father had been something other than the eternal-flame-steady, carried-on-his-shoulders-reassuring presence he'd always been in her life. He had had something of her sweaty palms and shaky knees and she couldn't help but find it a little disconcerting, even though of course she knew he was a regular person—

_not like the Fire Lord_

—and she was just being childish. A thought flared in her chest, surprising in its intensity: she wished Bai were back from his trip already.

'I just want to make sure you're ready. You have the chance not to rush into things.'

'I'll be ready, dad.'

'And…' He pulled back a little. 'Don't ever tell your brother I've asked you for this, but—look out for him, OK?'

'Yeah, I can see why you wouldn't want me to tell him that.'

Her father chuckled, as if the previous moment had never happened, and drew his arm away from her shoulders. 'I know he can take care of himself. But you're a bender and he's not.'

'So?' She hadn't realised she'd blurted out the word until the sound hung in the air between them.

'So there are places in the Earth Kingdom so lawless that a lone non-bender is no more than an easy target. Even if he's a soldier. Even if he's _not_.'

She blinked, looked down at the half-eaten fruit in her hand, its yellow flesh tinged orange by lamplight. Stone-broken limbs and bodies buried under mud flashed in her mind. _Lawless_, she repeated to herself. It was like something out that remote antiquity she'd learned about in school, when—

_how come there aren't any more Sun Warriors around_

—warlords had had absolute power over their serfs and people had believed you could ensure a good crop with blood sacrifices. But then, didn't the men in the Water nations keep their women in bondage, doing nothing but cooking and bearing children in some ice house? A shudder turned into a flash of anger and she let it brighten and sharpen. When the war was won the world would be criss-crossed by the black cords of railways, the white foam of trade ships laden with everything from fire wine to bolts of fabric from her parents' workshop. There would be laws, and schools, and lamplighters making their rounds, and streets so clean their paving stones would shine like glass.

'Don't worry about it, dad. I'll keep an eye on him when he's not looking,' she said. The night had deepened so much the sky was dusted with stars and she could barely make out her father's expression, but she was sure he was smiling. He patted her on the shoulder and this time it felt—

_almost_

—like it always had.

'I always worry about you two,' Hakou said and got to his feet. 'I'm your father, you can't hold it against me. Are you coming back in? There's starfruit cream. Or at least there was when I came here, I can't really make any guarantees at this point.'

'I'll be right in,' she said. Behind her she could hear her father's footsteps, the creak of the lattice door. Light spilled on the porch, dimmed again. She stayed on the step, the warm night air turning her muscles to rubber. Maybe that talk with father had actually helped, somehow, she thought as she glanced at the fruit forgotten in her hand. The edges of its flesh had begun to brown, so she tossed it into the roots of a tree. The knot inside her had slackened a little, even if she was sure tomorrow's test would, instead of firebending, be full of geography and grammar and she would spend all night having the most horrible dreams…

She looked up, ready to stand and walk back inside. A light on the neighbouring porch came on. She froze in place, one finger still on her lips, caught in the act of licking the juice droplets away. Even with the tree leaves and the porch's columns in the way, she could see a woman holding a bit of lit kindling to a small pipe. Blue smoke coiled up.

Kara kept looking, as though her neighbour were doing something utterly fascinating, instead of just sitting down on her porch, taking a long drag. The smoke spiralled up, curdled around the lit lantern and a flying speck—an ant-moth, Kara supposed—brushed the glass. _She's being so stupid_, she thought with a dash of irritation. She hoped that the woman was at least not a firebender, so that she wouldn't ruin her talent with her smoking; why should you have a gift when you were going to carelessly squander it away?

Of course, she really didn't know much about the woman—Wan or An or Ran or whatever her name was—or the rest of the people in that house. There was no one there her age, and most of the times the windows were shuttered like—

_dead_

—sleeping eyes, the garden overgrown with weeds. When they showed up at neighbourhood meetings, mother said, they almost always would stand quietly off to one side.

The woman lowered the pipe and looked directly at her.

Kara ducked. Cold rippled through her skin, fire through her nerves. Her body had reacted before her mind, but right now, half-crouching behind one of the bushes, she was sure she did not want the woman to see her. Sure, even through the distance and the thorny leaves, that the woman's stare was unblinking, the pupils two pinpricks of dark, the irises turned nearly colourless by the splash of light.

_Stop it_. But she didn't stand up. On the porch, the woman shook away a half bowl of ashes and got to her feet. Still she stared in Kara's direction, like a bird of prey, hunting.

Footsteps and the clip-clop of hooves sounded from the other end of the street. Kara edged forward, still in a crouch, a faint ache in her muscles. A closed carriage was coming, two silhouettes walking ahead of it. Black and scarlet flashed under the porch light, flame on sable cloth. Guards, she realised with a thump of her heart, but not the regular kind that would patrol the streets. For a second she was sure they had come down from the caldera, ready to knock on her door with a tsungi horn flourish. _Citizen Kara, the Fire Lord has heard of your talent and wishes to summon you to his presence_.

But they weren't coming to her house. Instead, the carriage drew to a halt a few yards away from the woman's porch and the two guards standing at the front moved towards her. They didn't march with the regimented stiffness of the Homeland Defence Force, though. They strolled like two friends dropping by for a party.

A flash from last summer, soon after Wan (An, Ran) and the rest of her household had moved in. Strings of scarlet paper lanterns, falls of red paper streamers. Wan (Ran, An) and the others had brought plates of komodo chicken for roasting, but when they'd walked away at the end of the festival, Hakou had been frowning.

'Can I help you?' the woman said, and stepped forward, to where Kara couldn't see her behind the curtain of leaves. Kara made a soft noise in the back of her throat and scrambled, still in a crouch, across the garden, until she was wedged between the trunk of a tree and the garden wall. Roots dug into her shins and the earth dampened her clothes, but she barely noticed. She was a spy, watching without being watched. A soldier crawling undetected across an enemy encampment.

'We'd just like you to come with us for a friendly conversation,' one of the guards said in a voice like polished obsidian. 'I take it you have no objections.'

The sound of a door opening. 'What's all this about?', a man said in a heavy-set voice.

'Come, come,' somebody else said. 'You don't want any more trouble, do you?'

'There is no law against a gathering of citizens,' Wan—Kara assumed—said. Her voice was high like a child's, the words spiky.

'No, there isn't,' the first guard said, still nonchalant. The next sentence sounded almost like an afterthought. 'Unless such gatherings are for seditious purposes, that is.'

Heat bloomed in Kara's chest. She squirmed, the tree trunk digging into her back, until she was facing the stone wall, and, very, very slowly, she inched up until she was peering over it. Something scuttled over her slipper. She shook it away.

A third guard stood at the back of Wan's house, also looking like she was an uninterested visitor. Wan and the man who'd spoken before stood by the front porch, bracketed by the other guards. For a moment Kara's gaze fastened absurdly on the stain of ink on the man's sleeve, the wrinkles in Wan's tunic, visible even from across the stretch of paving stones separating the two houses. Behind the window shutters a lamp was lit, then another. The light glinted off the steel bars on the carriage.

'We are not traitors,' Wan said, arms crossed over her chest. Kara's heart pushed into her throat. She was sure that any minute now the guards would look in her direction, spot her eyes wide and staring above the garden wall. That they would hear her swallow, the sound as loud as a branch cracking in two. _Did you not notice that your very own neighbours were plotting against me?_ the sun asked her.

'Hey, quit dawdling out there.'

She startled, bumped into the tree trunk with a painful crack, then cursed herself under her breath. It was only her brother, after all. She turned around in time to see Sou come down the porch steps. 'Where are you?'

Kara sidled out from behind the tree, her finger to her lips, and waved to her brother. 'Shh!'

Sou stilled. 'What is it?'

'Shut up and get down here,' she hissed.

He might not know what she was talking about, but he leaned down and hurried to his side. A twig snapped under his feet; she cringed.

'What's going on?' he said. Kara was sure he was being as loud as a komodo rhino.

'_Be quiet_,' she whispered, and cocked her head towards the garden wall. 'Take a look.'

They huddled close, his elbow poking her side—she gave him a quick jab with her shoulder—and peered over the wall together. The carriage had disgorged more guards and a few clumped around Wan and the man. Others surrounded the house in silence. One put out the light on the back porch. A reed-slender woman walked out the front door, hair dishevelled. One of the guards ordered her aside. 'Why are you doing this?' Wan said.

'Our neighbours are _criminals_,' Kara said.

Even in the second-hand light she could see Sou's eyes widen. 'Are they thieves? Are they murderers?' His voice dropped a fraction. 'Do you think they have, like, a room full of—'

'Shut up. They're not that kind of criminals. They're _traitors_.'

Sou's lips parted. His head whipped back towards their neighbours' house, where more lamps had been lit and one of the guards was carting out a wooden box. 'What do you think that is?' Sou said in a thread of voice.

'—don't you see that only proves our—' the man was saying, a guard's hand on his shoulder, but most of his words were muffled. Two other guards pulled a second man out of the house; his hands were bound, but still he kept talking. 'You cannot get rid of us all.'

'Kara! Sou! Are you two digging for treasure out there?'

Kara's breath hitched in her throat. She looked over her shoulder, at her mother staring out of a window, then back at her neighbours being marched into the carriage. A stream of things was being carried out their house—books, boxes, a lumpy bag. It was as if it was all happening in two separate worlds, the garden wall the thick black line of a border in a map: one country with her mother silhouetted in golden light, starfruit cream, Sou's books of mechanics, the—

_medals in the attic_

—scent of braised carp-sole. Another with people who plotted to make explosives, or poison, or to whisper lies in corners.

'Time to come inside,' Kya said.

Sou got out of their hiding place and grabbed Kara's hand. 'Come on,' he said.

The last thing she saw as she glanced over her shoulder was Wan being hauled into the carriage, black cloth covering her eyes.

:=:

The neighbours' house was locked and empty when she got up and sneaked out to knock on its door. She hadn't planned it—she hadn't even thought much about it from the minute her eyes snapped open from her tattered sleep and she washed and dressed, trying not to make a noise. But here she was, standing on a front porch that was empty of everything except a broken chair in one corner, rocking on the balls of her feet. The dawn hadn't come in yet, and here and there a straggler cricket still sung. She knocked again. Somewhere down the street a dog barked, once.

Then there was nothing.

_I was just wondering if you had some flour_. A story pooled on her tongue. She rehearsed it to herself as she stepped out of the porch and circled the house, stopping here and there to peer into a shuttered window. _Just a cup would be enough, really. It's just that we ran out and I was wondering if I could take a look at a criminal and see if they_— A slimy hand fell on her shoulder and she spun around, a scream trapped in her throat, a burst of fire in her fingertips.

It was only a tree branch, full of dawn-damp leaves. It had poked her shoulder as she brushed past it; apparently doing illegal things came with poor pruning skills. She leaned back against the stone wall, her heart still beating a hurried tattoo against her chest. She really should—

A flash of white out of the corner of her eye. She straightened, looked down. There was something on the ground, half-wedged under a storm drain. A sheet of paper, she realised as she leaned down to pick it up. It still smelled a little of damp earth and there was a footprint's impression on one corner. A chunk of the paper had been torn off.

_Just burn it._

But her hands were already unfolding it, like the fool in the story who couldn't help but lift the forbidden veil.

It was badly printed. That was the first thing she noticed, even before her mind registered the characters on the page. Half of them were blurred meaningless, anyway.

_A Bloody Crop From Bloody Roots_, read the column with the largest type, the words encased in a muddy red line. Another headline read _The Death Toll_— the rest of the characters were illegible. Judging from the text, even though much of it had been blurred by water and dirt into spidery black lines, it was about said death toll increasing. It went on and on about "your children coming back in urns" and "Earth Kingdom citizens dying— (a stain there) —the thousand".

She stopped reading, so much heat flowing under her skin that every nerve felt like a red wire and for a second she was sure the paper was going to erupt in flames. How could anyone write such rubbish? Of course soldiers died—

_he came back wrong_

—in any war, that was why you could apply to exempt a relative from the Lottery if you volunteered for the front, but they certainly didn't kill _civilians_. All the Earth Kingdom soldiers had to do was surrender. And what kind of people _wouldn't_ surrender?, she thought with a flash of anger. What kind of people wanted to fight _for_ hunger, and—

_war_

—strife, and poverty, and barbarism, and the rule of warlords and bandits? What kind of people didn't think that risking their lives—

_a different man_

—was a fair price to pay to end all that, to have a world united and at peace?

Cowards. No, worse than that. Traitors. Saboteurs. Spies.

She wanted to burn this trash, let the fire pour from her hands until they were wiped clean. She wanted to run back home and forget she'd even set foot in this place. But something kept her rooted to the ground, her hands fastened to the pamphlet. The tip of her tongue poked out from dry lips and her gaze darted to the windows, to the greenery hiding her house from sight. There was nothing beyond the empty stare of the shutters, a sprinkle of birds in the lightening sky. Her eyes went back to the paper.

_Fellow citizens, you are being lied to_, the second biggest headline said. _You are told you fight for peace and stability, but the War kills for the sake of stolen land and power_. Nonsense, of course—did they know nothing about the colonies? _You are told the War started in self-defence, but it began in murder_. A load of rubbish about the Air Nation followed; the pamphlet, of course, did not count the Avatar among their weapons.

She scanned the rest of the thing, _Truth from_— something that probably said "the front". Half-erased stuff about —_cost of the War_. Her heart skipped a beat almost before her eyes registered a deceptively small line of text: _It's time for our country to turn to the right course. It's time for the truth to stop being dangerous. It's time for the Fire Lord to_—

Her head whipped up. She glanced from side to side, sure that a guard was about to—

_blindfold her_

—walk out from behind the corner, ready to ask her what she was doing with this tissue of seditious lies. She was breathing shallowly, like an untrained firebender. _Stop it. Go home_. But her eyes moved of their own accord, taking in the lines near the bottom. _It is time for— (something) —courage! What you can do_:

This broke whatever chain held her in place. She crumpled the pamphlet in her hand and raced home, letting the gate bang behind her and stopping only when she was in the shadow of the front porch, one hand fastened over her galloping heart, the neighbours' house hidden from sight. She lowered her hands, straightened, told herself to stop being silly.

A wave of nausea hit her and she was sure she was going to be sick right over the wooden railings. Instead she straightened again, this time for good. Her heart quietened. Her stomach settled. Yes, she'd been stupid to waste her time reading the whole thing. The ending gave it away: it had been written by people plotting against the Fire Lord, planning an usurpation and coming up with these lies to trick people into supporting their cause, spreading their pamphlets like some kind of disease. Some disgruntled noble, probably, longing for the days when their ancestors had had absolute rule over some hapless province.

No wonder her neighbours had been—

_disappeared_

—taken away. They had probably fallen for it themselves, but this was a civilised place. They would be educated and given a second chance.

She looked down at the fist curled around the crumpled paper, and commanded her hand to open. She was sure the skin on her palm would be stained with ink, but it was clean. And she was just holding some paper. Just some stupid paper.

_Burn it. Get rid of it._

But she didn't burn it. She didn't throw it away.

Instead she folded it and folded it until it was no bigger than the gold-painted flame in her topknot and slipped it into her deepest pocket, where it sat like a live coal.

:=:

_It's a talisman_. The thought was unexpected. Her hand stilled. Ink welled on the tip of her brush.

_That's why you kept it._

She had mostly stayed quiet as she and Sou walked to school, even though her brother kept speculating about their felonious neighbours and their possible crimes. 'Personally,' Sou had said, his hand on his chest, 'I always thought they were weird people.' As they'd waited for the gong to ring, Nuan had leaned towards her with a conspiratorial whisper.

'Did you study?'

'Yeah, I guess,' Kara said, and rubbed her eyes. In her dreams she had had to write all kinds of nonsense on a map, over and over, and when she had spilled some ink the teacher had yelled for a trio of guards to cart her away.

'Yes,' Nuan said, and for the first time Kara was sure there was some needle-tip of malice in the other girl's voice. 'You look like you spent all night cramming.'

But instead of a test there had been an interminable geometry lesson, and afterwards the class had spent at least an hour copying and analysing a classic poem. All the while the folded-up pamphlet had remained in her pocket. She'd brush her fingers against it once in a while, and withdraw them with a start in her chest, sure that someone was watching, that any moment now a teacher was going to tell her to hand in such an interesting note.

That any minute now it was going to burn a hole in her pocket, write scarlet words on her skin, about death and lies.

It didn't, of course. And now, after a lunch of pickled fire squid she'd barely touched, she sat in class again, practicing her brush painting. She was no great artist, but the motions soothed her. They were controlled, like in firebending.

_Like people use to do long ago._

She painted the line of a sparrowkeet's unfolded wing. Yes, maybe that was why she'd kept that stupid pamphlet. Because—

_a bloody crop_

—if she got through today's supposed test with that thing in her pocket holding her down, she'd pass with flying colours for sure. Like those amulets and figurines people used to make to ward against bad magic and curses and ghosts and all sorts of nonsense. It was one thing to light a red candle or sweep away unfulfilled promises, but she'd always thought those older, stranger habits were nothing more than cobwebs of superstition, the result of times when people had had to rely on luck instead of laws. Now she understood the reasoning a little.

Not that it had much to do with reason, she had to—

The classroom's door slid open and Ms Kang stepped in. Kara straightened up as cold pooled in her lungs, at the bottom of her throat. Mr Shun waved at them to return to their work and stepped over to the other teacher. The two conferred for a few moments. Kara looked down at her painting. She'd accidentally let the tip of the brush rub against it and now a stain spread on the sparrowkeet's chest.

'Pupil Kara, can you come with me, please?' Ms Kang said. 'You can leave your things here.'

Whispers, stares. Kara's fingers remained curled around the brush as if stiff with rust. Her whole body stood in place, still, immovable, a flesh statue. Ms Kang's eyes narrowed a fraction. 'Kara?'

'Yes, Ms Kang.' Her mouth had moved of its own accord. The rest of her body followed. She could only watch like a paper lantern tethered to the ceiling as she laid down her brush neatly, got up, and walked to the front of the room. Her heart wasn't racing, her breath was steady. Here it came: a hole burned in her pocket, a spill of ash-ringed words. Her friends and the teachers would hurry forward to peck at them. _What is the meaning of this, Kara?_ The Fire Lord looked down at her, radiant and terrible. _Why are you in possession of these poisonous, treasonous lies?_

But of course there was no burning hole in her pocket, no accusations. Instead she walked after Ms Kang, out of the room and down the corridor. She tried to speak, failed, cleared her throat and tried again. 'Have I—have I done something wrong, Ms Kang?'

'What? No, no,' the teacher said with a dismissive gesture. 'It's just a test. Don't worry, it doesn't count for your marks. I think it mostly generates paperwork. At least it's only one student from each class. Your friend Nuan did fine, by the way.'

_So there_ is _a test_, she thought, with a flood of relief. Then it ebbed away, and she had space to notice Ms Kang was trying to be reassuring. It was disconcerting: one time Ms Kang had struck a boy's foot with the staff she used to mark rhythm and correct postures during their firebending classes, and then she'd told him he wouldn't have got hurt if he'd had his foot where it was supposed to be. Kara's fingers brushed the pamphlet again, and for one terrifying moment she was sure it had fallen out of her pocket. But no, it was still there.

'I see,' she said, rather limply.

Ms Kang remained silent until they entered the larger of the two practice arenas. The sand had been swept smooth, the targets set up. Kara stepped forward like she had so many times before. Here it was, that familiar feeling, terror and anticipation, pushing everything else away, so much so that it took her a second to spot the white-haired woman nestled in one stone-paved corner, slumped on a padded chair like a bag of rice swaddled in red cloth. Kara hesitated, then bowed to her. The woman cast an unhurried glance in her general direction, then turned back to Ms Kang.

'This is Kara from class number 3,' Ms Kang said. She was being obsequious, Kara realised. It sounded eerie. 'She's an exceptional—'

The old woman waved a vein-ridged hand and turned a gimlet eye towards Kara. 'Go on,' she said, in a grumpy croak.

Kara bowed again, slipped off her shoes, and took off her jacket. The sand crunched under her feet as she walked back to the entrance to hang it up, then the garment kept slipping off the hook. She heard the old woman cough. Finally, Kara turned around. There were walls but only a narrow band of roof, and the white sun hurt her eyes. Her palms were damp, her throat drier than the sand. The pamphlet weighed down her pocket like a steel counterweight.

_Come on_. She dropped to one knee, sure that she was going to keel over. She remained steady. Ready. Heat flowed in her veins, wafted up from her skin. A drop of sweat fell into her eyelashes. _This is what you were meant for. This is the gift you've been given_. A country built from the mixed blood and will of all the peoples in the world, from the First Flame—

_how come there aren't any more Sun Warriors around_

—to the children of people who'd braved storm-ridden seas and monsoon-drenched jungles to find a place of safety—

_dragged away in the night_

—and prosperity. Who else but the whole world's heirs could be the ones fit to rescue it?

The old woman coughed again.

_Maybe it was a wasted gift_, the sun said. It turned its blinding face away from her, leaving her cold and alone in its scarlet wake. _Maybe you care for me and your country and your destiny so little you would have turned a blind eye to those neighbours of yours. Maybe you wouldn't have denounced them_.

_No, I would!_ She jumped up with a jet of white flame. Time stopped. Thought unravelled. She moved from form to form, smooth as silk, deadly as steel. The flame, the light, the phoenix. She was invincible, unstoppable. Armies fell at her blows in a shower of wooden splinters. A tub of water burst in a column of steam. She struck, spun, dodged, kicked, jabbed. White flame cloaked her. She barely felt the heat.

'Stop.'

It was only a grumble, but the fire winked out. Kara wobbled, managed to stick the landing. Her skin gleamed with sweat, her muscles throbbed. If had felt like seconds, but it had been fifteen minutes at least. She looked at the corner. The old woman had pulled out a packet of dried hot peas and was methodically making her way through them. She finished chewing and spoke again, not bothering to look in Kara's direction. 'That's enough from this one. Who's next?'

'No.'

The word rang out across the arena, bounced off the walls, the dragons coiling in the columns, the hot sand now pearled with glass. 'No,' Kara repeated. The old woman looked at Kara, but there was no displeasure in her face.

'I am not—

_he put his medals in a box in the attic_

_it began in murder_

—finished.' She faltered, but when she spoke again, her tone was even fiercer. 'There is one other thing I would like to show you.'

Ms Kang's brows furrowed and she opened her mouth, but the old woman stopped her with a wave of her hand, then put the packet of peas on the ground before she reached into the folds of her clothes again. Her motions were excruciatingly slow, and Kara was sure she was going to—

_murder_

—scream. She managed to contain herself as the woman pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at her face, slow and thorough. Finally she folded the handkerchief again, laid it on her lap, and cleared her throat. 'Well, then.'

It took Kara a second to realise that was a "yes". She turned around, her face set, her muscles taut. Her arms moved in arcs. Energy rolled out from the small sun in her belly. A half step. Her chi rushed through her limbs, in and out and in, a crash of waves. Negative energy, positive energy, negative—

_danger_

_blindfold_

—energy. Positive—

It burst out of her hand, brighter even than the sun, and buried itself in the ground with a roar.

Kara turned around, drained, almost tripping over her own feet. She looked at her hand. It wasn't even singed.

'Well,' the old woman said. Her voice was a fraction brighter. Next to her, Ms Kang stood wide-eyed. 'Lightning, eh?'

Whatever this thing was, Kara knew, with a steely and wordless instinct, that she had passed.

Her hand touched her pocket again.

_Talisman._

:=:

It wasn't until later that Kara found out the old woman had been sent by the Fire Lord himself.

* * *

><p><strong>++The End++<strong>

* * *

><p><strong>NotesDisclaimer:** A murder tree is a real tree, called _Cerbera odollam_ and commonly known as the suicide tree because of its highly toxic fruit. In the Fire Nation they'd call it a murder tree because, well, let's not kid ourselves. The Fire Nation is home to several (half-) species that IRL are indigenous to the Americas, like the tomato-carrot and the tigerdillo, so it made sense to me they'd have chocolate, along with potato hybrids.

One of the reasons why I wanted to write this story was to take a character who's heroic and sympathetic in the canon and place her in a situation in which she's a willing part of the evil regime (in fact, in which her devotion to her family, community, and society is one of the thing that make her go along so happily with a fundamentally horrible system). I hope she comes across as relatable and understandable while at the same time being incredibly unsettling. And while writing from the perspective of the ideology she's uncritically swallowed kinda makes me want to go wash my brain, I have to admit that coming up with all the contradictions and double-think was quite fun. Who needs Lake Laogai when almost everybody already thinks O'Brien-uh, I mean the Fire Lord ;) is holding up four fingers simply because accepting things uncritically is the most comfortable thing to do?

Also, you can't see it in this website, but on LJ and DW, the quote I used for the lj-cut text ("Few are guilty, but all are responsible.") is by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I thought it was rather apt.


	6. Switch: Stone Heart: Part One

**Switch: ii. Stone Heart**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom:** _Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Characters/Pairing(s):** Azula, Ursa, Zuko, Ozai; gen

**Rating:** M

**Summary:** Earth Kingdom!Azula AU. Ba Sing Se falls in a hail of fire when she is thirteen, and the Lady Zula escapes with her brother and mother. Zula swears retribution… but before she can have her vengeance, she has to stay alive in a war-torn land. Very, very loosely based on the _Snow White_ fairy tale. Rated M for violence, warfare, death, and other mature themes. Written for **au_bigbang** 2012.

**Warnings:** This story is set in the midst of an illegal war of invasion and occupation, so where do I _possibly_ begin? But seriously, while I try to avoid graphic descriptions, the story does deal with many themes and situations that most people are likely to find disturbing, and reader discretion is _strongly_ advised. Trust me, this more than deserves its M rating. On a much lighter note, AU!Azula is only a bit less dickish than she is in the canon (though due to her very different circumstances, her posturing strikes me as unwittingly funny; YMMV, though). Detailed spoiler-y warnings (scrambled, paste into rot13dotcom to read): zbqrengryl tencuvp ivbyrapr/jnesner; zhygvcyr qrnguf (vapyhqvat znwbe punenpgref); zbqrengryl tencuvp qrfpevcgvbaf bs culfvpny naq cflpubybtvpny qrcevingvba, vawhel, naq vyyarff; vzcyvrq frzv-pbreprq frk jbex; (irel inthryl) vzcyvrq encr; aba-pbafrafhny ahqvgl nf cneg bs n fprar vaibyivat aba-frkhny ivbyrapr; dhnfv-fhvpvqny vqrngvba.

**Word Count:** 26,800

**Author's Notes:** I slightly tweaked Azula's name because obviously she wouldn't be named after Azulon in this universe. The rest of the names didn't really need changing, but I changed Ozai's a little to give the family the same naming pattern. I am of course aware that, in the canon, airships were only invented after Aang was found. However, due to the different events in this AU, it seemed logical that the Fire Nation would have (even) more of an incentive to finance the creation and building of new war machines. Also, while this is a work of fiction and any non-canonical material is purely my own invention, I am indebted to relatives and friends and their stories of survival in the most horrifying circumstances. Again, this story is completely fictional and I have betrayed no confidences, but if there any realism in this, it's due to them. The faults are entirely my own.

Many, many thanks to **theadaze** for picking this story to illustrate (and for creating such wonderful art!) and once again to **greedyslayer** for being able to beta this at the last minute.

To see the amazing pictures **theadaze **did for this story, go to **theadaze**dot**livejournal**dot**com/36972**dot**html **or simply click on the link provided in my profile page.

* * *

><p><strong>Switch: Stone Heart<strong>

* * *

><p><em><span>One<span>_

Father's grandmother had been an Honoured Sister, so when the four of them didn't have dinner in their apartments, they were allowed a place in the Earth King's own dining room. Still, great-grandmother had come—with a ceremonial wool and brocade dress so thick it almost stood up on its own and a mirror that looked like a gleaming eye in its carved frame—from a northeastern city-state whose claims to fame were few. As such, their seats were tucked so far into the edge that Zula could only see the Son of the Earth if she inched forward a little, tried to find a clear line of sight through the throng of tables, heads, and formal clothes, and squinted.

And she was pretty sure all she was seeing was the hulking shape of his bear.

She drew back, certain that no one could find anything in her face except slight boredom. Her father—

_had not been_

—was not, as a rule, a patient man, but one time she had got him to promise to tell her how King Kuei had acquired such an unusual animal. Now his seat, which had lain vacant during the previous evening, was occupied by a man she knew only in the way she knew most of the other diners: the name of a tile on a vast and complicated game of pai sho.

She'd never cared for pai sho.

The gnawing in her stomach deepened. She pushed it away, ate another paper-thin sliver of fish. The cooks had done their best, of course, but the saffron sauce couldn't completely disguise the faint mercury taste underneath. She wondered if they were eating the University's research koi, or perhaps the trash-fattened fish who managed to survive in the Silver River. Soon they would probably be eating roasted elephant-rats and boiled leather.

Laughter rose in her throat, green and spiky like the glowing crystals in the ceiling, and she turned it into a cough before it could spill out. A glittering shoal of eyes turned towards her, then quickly lost interest. She looked at her mother's polished face from under her eyelashes and had to resist the temptation to roll her eyes at her brother. Instead, she made a small chunk of stone ripple under her toes and jab Zuko's foot. He jerked a little in surprise, then went back to his dinner as if nothing had happened, but Zula knew he had received the message. She didn't need a lot of excuses to poke him with her earthbending—he practically _invited_ it—but this particular poke meant "we need to talk".

'I am indisposed,' she whispered in her court voice, the one groomed to sound like the clicking of beads. 'Please convey my sincerest apologies to the Earth King.'

It wasn't even a _complete_ lie, she thought as she made her way out of the hall, shadowed by an attendant. For a second everything struck her with a slap of nausea: the age-puffed skin under the eyes of the man who'd taken her father's seat, the clink of chopsticks, her mother's stillness, the smell of saffron, the greenish light from the crystals that she'd always found cooly beautiful but now only made her think of—

_rot_

—mould.

She composed herself and dismissed the attendant. She was thirteen, not a baby, and she was the Lady Zula, not some mewling idiot. _You are marble. You are the mountain_. She repeated it to herself like a mantra, the words from the forbidden book her father had given her. _It will be our little secret_, he'd said, not for the first time nor the last. She'd devoured all the the words and pictures about tactics and strategy and war as if they were the poetry and art and etiquette her mother insisted were vital for a proper young lady. Zula had never understood the logic; how could arranging coloured pebbles be any more beautiful than the picture of the Siege of Omashu in the Second Empire? She had spent hours memorising each line, each bloody spill of rust-brown ink, each weak spot of crumbling rock. Despite the age staining the pages, the banners were still bright as flowers, and the inkstone fragments had hummed under her fingertips.

_You are the rock face. You are the wall that will stand a thousand lifetimes._

There were eyes everywhere in Ba Sing Se, but she was sure no one had seen her slip back into the apartments. Inside, she bended away a small chunk of floor in her bedroom, and huddled in the pool of light from a lantern, the book cradled in her hands. Her heart beat a steady tattoo against her ribcage. She ordered it quiet. _You are the wall._

She was reading about General Gong reaching the westernmost shore when her mother and brother returned. She tucked the book out of sight, rose, and carried the lantern into the parlour. When she was little they had owned several glowing crystals. Now they were allowed a small measure of burning oil every week, and their candles, which had always been fine scorpion-beeswax, were now tallow, its greasy scent hanging in the air like a ghost.

_There is no war in Ba Sing Se, and we are winning._

'Are you all right?' Ursa said as she undid her elaborate buns. Ink-dark hair spilled over her shoulders.

'I'm fine,' Zula said, with a sideways glance at her brother. Zuko glanced back. 'I would like to go to bed n—'

A knock on the front door froze her in place. Mother stepped forward and slid the door open a crack. It had been a long time since they'd had lights in the sliver of rock garden, but the sun had set not long before, and Zula could make out half a painted smile. She was sure the night air smelled faintly of ashes.

Mother stiffened. 'How may I be of assistance?'

The door opened completely to reveal a woman in the green dress of the Grand Secretariat. The smile, Zula noticed, did not reach her eyes, and when a breeze tugged at her hair and brushed it against her face, she made no motion to push it away.

'Hello,' the woman said in a voice as colourless and smooth as glass. 'My name is Joo Dee. I hope I have not come at a bad time.'

'Not at all,' mother said, a fraction too bright. 'May I offer you a refreshment?'

'Oh, I couldn't impose.' Joo Dee's smile never wavered. Her eyes remained blank. 'Forgive me for taking your time. I just have a message from the Grand Secretariat.'

Zula's flesh curdled. Something tugged at her, and she nearly—

_shrieked_

—jerked away before she looked down and saw her brother's hand clutching hers, behind cover of their mother's back. She looked at Zuko's face, his lips pressed together into a thin line, and yanked her hand away. Unlike him, she did not require coddling.

'Lord Zai has had to absent himself to assist in a private matter. He will return once that is concluded. Of course, once he is back, the Earth King will be happy to reward you for your trouble. Perhaps a personal invitation may be warranted. Good night, and I hope you will continue in good health.' She did not wait for a reply before bowing and walking away.

Ursa shut the door and paced for a few moments before sinking onto a chair with a rustle of fabric. 'Well,' she said, then lifted her face, her lips stretched into another painted smile. When she tucked her hair behind her shoulder, her fingers smeared her face-powder. 'At least your father will be back soon. I am sure.'

'Sure. Soon,' Zuko repeated at her side.

Zula snorted. Her brother's head snapped towards her.

'You don't have to lie to us, you know,' she said, and started examining her fingertips. The skin on her palm was too smooth. _Marble. Mountain. Rock face._

'What are you talking about?' Zuko said.

Zula looked up. Her mother shot her a warning glance. Like always, she ignored it. 'Come on, we all know what it means.' She took a step forward. 'Do you _really_ think father is doing something for the King? He's not coming back.'

'Zula—' mother began, but they both ignored her. Zuko took another step.

'So you're saying the Grand Secretariat sent someone to just lie to us? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.' His arms were crossed over his chest, his jaw squared, but she could hear a hairline crack in his voice. _Weak._

'Don't you get it?' she said with an eye-roll. 'They don't want us to know what happened to him so we won't be able to tell anyone else. One way or another.'

'But apparently _you_ know what happened.'

Out of the corner of her eye Zula saw her mother stand up. She ignored her, her attention focused on her brother. His bronze skin was rage-blanched, feverish under the lantern's glow. 'Because only one thing makes sense, dum-dum.' Inside her sleeves, her hands balled into fists. 'He was fighting in the Outer Wall and he must have been killed.'

'Children—'

'Stop lying,' Zuko spat. 'What would he be doing in the Outer Wall?'

'Oh, _please_,' she said in a voice diamond-hard, diamond-cold. 'Even you must have figured out by now that we're at war.'

'I know there's some trouble, but—' His face hardened again. 'But father isn't dead. Take it back.'

'Or if not, he's as good as.' The words were razors in her mouth, but she pushed them out, feeling an odd kind of pleasure as each struck his face, like—

_passing on poison_

—the sour-sweet pain of an old bruise.

Then his face hardened, and for a moment he wasn't the brother who was allowed to learn some real earthbending but was never very good at it, the brother who was better at all the useless things he knew were trifles and she knew were her fate, the brother who'd never been inside that secret circle that had begun the day father had seen her crack a boulder in two when she was four.

For a moment she was almost—

_afraid_

—worried.

'Take. It. Back.' The chunk of stone that jutted from the floor nearly struck her. She blocked it and sent it flying back in a cloud of dust.

'_Enough!_'

Zula bit down a yelp as something grabbed her arm and yanked her up. The stone sank back into the floor, an inch away from its intended target. She looked up into her mother's face. Ursa had grabbed both her children, and she looked like she'd find them no harder to pick up and carry than a pair of fans, or two sheets of rice paper. 'Enough,' she snapped again, then released Zuko. He nearly stumbled back.

'What is wrong with you?' Ursa's face was so close to hers, Zula could smell her make-up, the faint sheen of sweat. 'Why would you say such a thing?' Mother's fingers dug into her shoulders, almost hard enough to hurt. 'Why can't you be—'

'Normal? _Nice_?' Zula snapped, and shook off her grip. Ursa stepped back, rubbed her hands together. Her face softened, and Zula disliked her all the more for it. Father always told her—_had_ always told her—that if you had the luck of hardness, then you should be hard. Better the honest blow than pretending to yourself you had never meant it. If you couldn't be strong, you could at least not aspire to weakness. 'I would like to go to bed now,' Zula said, and turned her back on mother, brother, the pool of light from the spluttering lantern.

The nausea was back, a hot tight grip on her stomach, a ripple of wet sand in her lungs. Instead of doubling in two, she walked into her bedroom, her back ramrod-straight, her head held high.

:=:

'Are you asleep?'

'Yes,' she grumbled, and pulled the quilt over her head. It was only autumn, but the night air was rimmed with cold. Behind her, she heard a rustle, then a creak as the screen dividing the bedroom in half was pushed aside. Bare feet padded on the floor. Her bed curtains stirred.

'Do you really think father is dead?'

Zula pushed the bedclothes back and rolled onto her side. In the milky light pouring in through the gaps in the shutters, her brother's emerald eyes were two black buttons, his face a blueish moon above her bed. He didn't look angry anymore. Just worried.

'Yes,' she said, and sat up. Zuko flopped onto the bed. She had to resist the urge to give him a shove with her foot.

'How can you know?'

She made a small noise of derision. 'What, so you can go whine to _mother_?'

'No.' A word like a slab of basalt. 'I just…' He raised his hands, let them drop. 'I have to know.'

'Oh.' Their eyes met. A memory rose to her, unbidden and unwanted, flushing her face hot: the times when she'd been sure—

_father_

—nobody was watching and she would burrow under her bedclothes like a vole-hog, until there was nothing beyond the pain of her nails digging into her palms, the dark behind her tight-closed eyes, the tremors racing through her flesh. Once Zuko had come to wake her up and had seen her like that; she'd spent the next week capturing spider-flies to hide in his sheets.

'Come on,' she said, and kicked both memory and bedclothes away. 'Get dressed.'

He didn't get up. 'Where are we going?'

'Why?' she drawled. 'Are you afraid?'

Even in the dark, she could tell he bristled at that. It pleased her a little. 'I'm not _afraid_.'

Moments later she was bending a passageway into the sleeping city. They scuttled into the streets, the palace complex a thorny shadow behind them. She made them cling to corners, alleyways, courtyards clotted with night. Once she had to yank Zuko to a hiding place behind a fountain as a patrol walked by. She waited as their footsteps clattered past, sure that—

_her_

—Zuko's breath on her back was as loud as a boarcupine's grunts. Water—it smelled brackish—dribbled down the rim and onto her braid. Then the footsteps faded away, and she knew she needn't have worried. The patrolmen had been on the lookout for anyone who might have got in; it would probably never occur to them that someone might be getting _out_. 'Come on,' she whispered, and they were on their way again.

It took them a while to wind their way across the night-draped city, even though they weren't going any further than halfway across the Inner Ring. Zuko didn't say a word as they made their way past the University's sleeping gardens, where only a few insects chirped and half the tree branches had been cut off. He didn't say a word even as she led them under the stone arches of a monorail track and the wide avenues began to narrow. She had expected him to start whining and pestering her with questions as soon as they sidled into the maze of unfamiliar buildings, the stone blue-tinged and the streets dark under the cloud-ridden sky. After all, they were under strict orders—all the more serious because unspoken—to never venture beyond the palace, beyond the trips to places like the city gardens (which had fewer and fewer animals) or the opera (which had fewer and fewer singers and props). Not that she cared about such orders, of course, but she was sure her older brother did. Instead, he was silent all the while, following her as stealthily as if he'd been doing it his whole life. Something itched between her shoulder-blades; she ignored it.

'Here we are,' she said. They'd stopped by a small tower, like a finger of stone pointing at the sky. It was an observatory, the kind where you'd climb up, then feed a few bronze coins into a spyglass so you could see the city. This one's windows were dark, the door shut by a chain where a wooden sign hung. A scrap of music floated from the other side of the street. An open door spilled light, then closed.

That was unusual. Not a lot of music in the city these days, and the lit streetlights grew fewer and fewer.

'It says closed for repairs,' Zuko said, and stepped forward to touch the wooden sign hanging from the chain.

She rolled her eyes. 'Do you _see_ any repairs?'

He seemed to consider the question for a moment, as if she'd posed a serious inquiry. 'No, but—'

'Then come on,' she said, and ducked under the chain. The stone enveloping the latch shifted under her palm with a groan and a smear of dust. Zuko was at her side in an instant, pushing the door open. Her muscles knotted with irritation. She made sure she was the first one through the opening.

The only light inside came from the high window slits, milky streaks of moonlight that barely touched the gloom. She'd been here a few times before, but the air still smelled stale, and the spiral steps were furry with dust.

'Come on,' she said, and began the climb. A spiderfly web brushed her face. She stopped and looked over her shoulder at her brother, who stood frowning at the foot of the stairs. _Good_, was her first thought, but she pushed it away. 'What are you waiting for?'

'I don't think we're supposed to be here.'

'Well, if you're _scared_…' she drawled, and punctuated it with a dismissive flutter of her hand.

'I'm not _scared_,' he said, and clambered up the steps behind her.

'Fine. Keep it down.' She hurried up, the sickly-sweet smell of the dust prickling her nose. The observatory stairs had a metal railing, but it was brittle with rust. She guided herself by the ridges of stone wall against her fingers. At the end of the spiral staircase there was a gap where two of the steps had crumbled. She bended a bridge across the gap easily, feeling her brother's gaze on her back like a—

_burning_

—hot stone.

The domed room under the roof was full of windows, the starlight enough to see the places where the stone was stained with rain, mottled with mould and the dry husks of ant-moths. She stepped up to the spyglass bolted to the middle of the floor, and wiped the thick lens with her sleeve. 'Take a look.'

He didn't move.

'It's not going to _bite_ you, Zuzu,' she said, and let out an exaggerated sigh of annoyance. Zuko stepped forward and grabbed the other end of the spyglass so hard it nearly struck her as it swivelled. She edged out of the way, and felt like she'd won nonetheless.

'Point it to the other end of the city.'

She didn't need to look through the dirt-speckled glass to know exactly what he was seeing. She'd been here and looked at it herself enough times for it to be carved in her—always excellent, of course—memory.

The first time had been with father. After her first look she'd stepped back and bumped against father's robe, the muscled body underneath. She'd pulled away quickly, the faint trace of camphor basil still in her nostrils. Father did not like to be touched, though at least she wasn't some sticky, grubby little child.

'Is that—?'

She startled, smoothed it over. He'd just said exactly the same words she had when she'd first looked. She had done it in daylight, of course, the first time; even so, the image wouldn't be very different, except for the hard shine of sun on stone. There would be the city, so vast even the observatory's height and the lens's magnification were barely enough to see its fullness. She'd always heard it would take three days, all told, to walk from one end of Ba Sing Se to the other, but it wasn't until she'd seen it through the spyglass that she'd really believed it. The biggest, oldest, most magnificent city in the world. An ocean of tile and slate and rock. Mazes of sandstone. Carved marble like frozen foam. Jewelled emerald domes rising from islands of greenery. Monorail tracks criss-crossing the landscape like seams. The river wound through it, silvery and flat. At the water's widest, a town would fit inside it. Here and there, thinner veins spooled away from it.

But he wasn't talking about that.

'Fire Nation,' she said. She almost spat out the name.

The spyglass groaned a little as her brother moved it around to get a better view. It took a while to take it all in, she admitted: the swollen shadow, the steel glint of war machines and siege engines, the banners like blood droplets in the distance. No, she corrected herself, he wouldn't be able to see those properly at night. Only the winking fire.

Zuko released the spyglass, sat back on the balls of his feet. He didn't look scared, she noticed. He didn't even look surprised. 'How can the Fire Nation be here?'

She twirled the tip of her braid around her finger. 'Isn't it obvious?' she said, as if the subject were no more important than a game of cards. 'We're being besieged. And they've broken through the Outer Wall.'

He looked at her, his eyes two dark slicks in the starlight. He wasn't going to tell her she was lying to annoy him, or complain about crazy girls. People were stupid enough to deny the obvious, but reality was no more bendable than metal or wood.

When she'd first seen it she'd been surprised, just for a moment. She had assumed a siege would clamour with blades and thrown boulders and the thuds of battering rams. It shouldn't be like that, so still, happening while people ate dinner or tuned sounding stones or walked dully to the market.

Then—quickly—she'd realised it was like rot. A sickness. A foam of black decay and scarlet disease, slowly eating away at the rind and flesh of an apple-melon.

'But we drove them back,' Zuko said. 'That man, what was his name, he broke through the Outer Wall, but he—'

'General Iroh,' Zula said, but her brother had already swallowed the rest of the sentence and now glanced at the opening on the floor, his face shuttered.

'Don't worry,' she said, words oily with poison, and shrugged a tremor away as she sat under the wide windows, relishing the stone's cold touch on her neck. The night air spilling in smelled clean. 'No one is listening.'

That hung between them for a moment, like the webs and dust.

People listened, she knew, sometimes. Sometimes other people would go—

_perhaps a personal invitation may be warranted_

away and be different when they came back. Only they weren't supposed to be different. Not really. Not in the world that—

_besieged_

—encircled father's study when he locked the door and had her bend until her skin was slippery with sweat.

_There is no war in Ba Sing Se, and it was over a while ago._

Zuko said nothing, and edged back until he was sitting by her side, his hands on his knees. She didn't move.

'We kicked him out. He went away. Regrouped. Came back. Their army is much bigger this time, father sa—' She fell silent. Heat flared in her face, cold in the spot under her ribcage.

'Are they trying to break through the Middle Wall?' Zuko said, and she wondered if he was ignoring what she'd said or if he'd just deliberately misheard it, which he did a lot. A page from the book flashed in her mind, the characters vivid enough to touch. The drawing of the square, for strength, which interested her, and the circle, for eternity and the great wheel of being, which did not. _Let the rocks on the ground be your army_.

'Probably. Unless they think they don't have to, of course,' she said. 'Maybe they think they can poison the river and burn the fields until we surrender.' Her tone was breezy. She'd never really thought about where her food came from. It always appeared in front of her at every meal, even if the vegetables and fruits were increasingly stringy, the meat tough, the rice and dough sticky.

'That's stupid.' He turned towards her. 'Do they really think we're just going to let them take over the city? Just… sit back and let them march up and down the streets?'

'You misspoke.'

'What?'

'You said "they think".' Her tone was as sharp as she could make it, which was very, but for once it wasn't directed at him. She let go of the loose cuff thread she'd been worrying and turned to her brother. 'I heard their general has a son, tucked away in their kingdom. Maybe his father is planning on marrying him to one of the Earth King's—' She faltered for half a second as she tried to find the right word. '—relatives. After they win.'

Zuko made a low noise in his throat. 'Don't those people know _anything_?'

'No. Do you know why their general is called the Dragon of the West?'

'He is?'

'Yes. It's so that they remember which way to go when they want to get back.'

He laughed at that, to her surprise—her brother wasn't the laughing type. Mostly he wore an expression like he was permanently remembering that time he'd found a dead elephant-mouse inside his slipper.

She was smiling, she realised, and hurriedly told herself it must be at the memory. That had been such a good prank.

'Hey, Zula,' Zuko said, a ghost of a chuckle still on his lips, 'do you know what's a pai sho treasure hand in the Fire Nation? Nine unrelated tiles and a flame. I mean a fireball. I mean a thrown—'

'Yes, I got it, thank you. You really are terrible at this.'

He turned his face away. 'I don't suppose you'd know what that's like,' he said, and her tongue cooled. _Not at anything that matters_ bubbled on its surface. But instead of lobbing the words, heavy and sharp, like she used to, like she'd always do, she found herself saying nothing. Her knees drew up, and she fastened her hands around them.

_The rock stands on its own_, her father was saying. Voice like polished obsidian, eyes like twin chips of hard jade. He was right—

_until he let himself get killed_

—because he was always right.

So it was stupid, this sudden little tug in her side, a cobweb-thin thread hanging on the floor between her and Zuko. She was suddenly very aware of his breathing, the solidity of his presence. Her stomach clenched. It had to be the fish, making her queasy.

'Maybe he's been captured.'

She looked at her brother. He didn't look at her, just kept staring straight ahead, past the spyglass, into the dark and the starlit windows. Now that the clouds had parted, a full moon shone in the sky like a bone button. 'Or maybe he's just injured,' he added, his voice dust-soft.

'No.'

This time he did look at her. 'You can't know that.'

'He wouldn't surrender.'

'Maybe it wasn't his idea,' he said, brow furrowing, and sat up away from the wall. 'Maybe he was trapped or unconscious…'

'_No_,' Zula snapped. A tomb lid. 'He'd never let himself be captured unless it were part of a plan. And if it were part of a plan, we would have seen some sign of it by now. Or, actually, _I_ would have seen a sign of it by now.'

She felt him turn to her, but she didn't meet his eyes. 'You're not making any sense,' Zuko said. 'And why do you want so bad for father to be dead, anyway?'

All of a sudden, her skin felt too tight, her sinews taut like puppet strings. She got to her feet, moved towards the other side of the room. 'I wouldn't expect you to understand,' she said, voice sweet with contempt. 'After all, father was the best. And when you're the best you either win or—' She stopped, turned around just enough to be able to glance at Zuko over her shoulder. 'Or you lose only when other people betray you. When they can't even be honest enemies. The kind of cowards who throw stones and hide their hands. Doesn't that sound like the ash-heads?'

This time, her brother didn't argue. He just threw his hands in the air. His shoulders shrugged in defeat. 'Fine. Suit yourself. Father is dead.'

The air cooled again into chalky silence. Zula stepped up to the spyglass and ran a finger over the rim of its shuttered eye, feeling the phantom buzz of the dirt impurities in the metal. Another memory drifted up, unbidden, unwanted: the last time she and father had been here, at the tail end of summer. They had come in daylight, and so heat had splashed on the window sills, hazed the jade-green domes. She disliked the heat—spring, green and foggy, would be her favourite season if she ever concerned herself with such nonsense as having a favourite season—but father had seemed, as ever, unaffected, his skin and clothes not bearing a trace of sweat or discomfort. She had tried to do likewise as he'd quizzed her on the great sieges of history, the strategies and mistakes of their commanders, how it all applied to a great city whose name he did not have to say. When he had been satisfied, a corner of his mouth had pulled up and he'd said 'well done, my dear'; the sting of heat in her eyes and the dull ache in her knees from standing for so long vanished.

She lobbed the thought away. What did it matter now? Now that father—

_couldn't have been that good not if he got_

—was gone, one way or another, the memory and all like it were useless. All she should concern herself with were the things he'd had time to teach her. The knot in her stomach tightened, queasiness—the fish, she was sure—riding into her throat. She turned to her brother. 'What do you care anyway?' she said. 'Father didn't teach _you_. He didn't even like you.'

Even in the half-dark, a few yards away from him, she could tell he was rolling his eyes. When his answer came, however, his tone was quiet. 'He likes me. He taught me.'

She froze, and barbed—

_hurt_

—anger darted through her chest. Zuko already _had_ a master, a real sifu to teach him real earthbending. He'd complain about his lessons as if receiving them were as natural as breathing, as much his due as the clothes he wore and the bed he slept in, and when Zula pointed out that maybe he wouldn't have to complain so much if he were actually _good_ at it, mother would shush her and go back to telling Zuko he already had mastered the most important part of earthbending, facing a task head on even when it seemed unsurmountable…

_Her_ lessons, her secret lessons, were not a birthright. She had worked for them with every scrap of skill and talent, until those had become the only thing that mattered. Not her birth order, or her sex, or her position. Not if she was nice, or pliable, or likeable. Father had seen that rare, glittering gift in her. Unquestionable. Undeniable.

He had taught her because she _deserved_ it. He shouldn't have taught her brother too.

'No,' she said. Her fingers picked at an invisible speck of dust on her sleeve. 'Father liked _me_.' A lie, really—what she and father had was something different and far better than mere likes or dislikes. She'd used the term Zuko would understand. 'Don't worry, mother likes _you_,' she added. Her tone made it clear which one was preferable.

Zuko looked up, his hands still resting on his knees. 'Mother likes you too.'

He sounded unconvinced. 'No, she doesn't,' she said, her tone as indifferent as she could make it, which was very. 'She thinks I am odd, and unpleasant, and _wrong_. But I don't really care.' She turned her face away, riffled through her memories in search of a time when she and Ursa hadn't been engaged in a constant—

_siege_

—tug-of-war. As she'd expected, she found none. Her earliest memory was of her mother's stunned face after Zula had abandoned her exploration of her own toes to calmly inform her that the _proper_ name for the thing Ursa was offering her was "biscuit", _actually_. She thought of all the little skirmishes in their silent war, the rebukes when Zula said the things everybody else was thinking but didn't have the guts to voice. The barely-suppressed sighs when Zula would sit, face bolted shut, through some session of poetry or art appreciation only to rush away at the earliest possible opportunity, back to scrolls and books full of strategy and fighting forms.

The looks her mother would give her sometimes, sideways looks, under-the-eyelashes looks. Zula was never sure whether she was meant to notice those looks; had she cared, she wouldn't be sure which option would be preferable. The look of someone wondering what exactly was it she had given birth to. Someone wondering where exactly this little stranger had come from, this odd creature with the face of a little girl and a tongue full of thorns, a steel contraption mind. A creature who had been born to cleave mountains in half and fire off rocks rather than sculpt them.

If she were weak, it would, she was sure, bother her. But she wasn't weak, and so when Ursa and Zuko laughed together and she was sure they were mocking her in their conspiratorial whispering, Zula told herself all she should notice was the way they sounded like a flock of frightened birds.

'No. I am sure you don't,' Zuko said, and got to his feet. She felt like telling him something sharp for having intruded in her thoughts.

Instead she just shrugged. 'It doesn't matter. I will be a general someday.'

'Girls can't be generals,' he scoffed, then paused. His tone lost its mockery. 'I guess they maybe have women generals in Kyoshi Island, though. But I think they call them something else—what is that word they used before, we learned it in our lessons—_shou_ something? Or maybe it was _sou_…'

Zula glared at him. 'You're even terrible at insults.' She carried on before he could reply. 'Besides, I don't have to travel all the way to Kyoshi Island. When you were so busy failing to memorise their old language, did you skip your history and geography lessons? There were female generals, sometimes. And if we lived in a village, I would have to know how to defend our land against… gazellions, or whatever. Things with fangs. Even if I were a non-bender. So do try to keep up.'

'But you shouldn't have to,' he said, a little bristly. Maybe he was annoyed by her crack about his forgotten lessons. 'I mean, that's the point of Ba Sing Se. That's why it's the greatest city in the world. It's like—like in those old days when you could travel alone with a big bag of money from the eastern mountains to the shores of the Lonely Sea and not have to worry about, well, _anything_. You don't have to spend your life surviving. You can use your bending for culture and art and—'

'Yes, I was told all that too,' Zula said. She glanced at the spyglass, where a thread of moonlight blazed on the metal. 'Do you still think there is no war in Ba Sing Se?'

More silence. Then Zuko's hand rose before falling back to his side. 'Can we not fight all the time?' he said.

Something inside her swayed, as if she were practicing a difficult form and was about to lose her balance. 'What are you talking about, dum-dum?' she said.

He didn't argue back. Instead he stepped up to her, so close she was sure she could feel his breath on her skin. 'We're brother and sister,' he said. 'We're supposed to help each other. Not tear each other down all the time. It's wrong.'

She turned away. Some odd little stone bobbed in her throat. 'You sound like a fool,' she said, but the words were pebble-small, pebble-weak.

Behind her she could hear her brother stepping away, the thump of a stone being bended in frustration. She could almost see him: the balled hands, the set jaw. He was about to tell her she was crazy, then stomp away. _Good_.

Instead, something alighted on her shoulder. She nearly shook it away in revulsion, as if it were a large insect. 'Father is dead, Zula,' he said.

She pulled her shoulder away. 'I know. I told _you_.'

'Father is dead,' he said again, his tone still blank. 'Father is dead.'

_Shut up._

'—dead. Father is dead. Father is—'

_Shut up shut up shut up_

'I know!' she yelled, and spun around. 'I know! I know!'

The stones in the walls groaned and shook, sprayed down dust. Under her feet, the floor quaked. The spyglass wobbled perilously with a thin cry from its rust-stiff hinges.

She dropped to her knees, spent, her heart racing, pain shooting through her muscles. Loose hair stuck to her forehead, damp with—

_shame_

—sweat. The room stilled. Silence poured back.

_There. There_. She looked up at her brother's face, high up above hers. 'Are you happy? Are you enjoying it?' she blurted out. She pushed the hair off her eyes with the back of her hand and had to fight the urge to sink her nails into her own flesh. 'I'm not going to cry.'

He didn't laugh. He didn't even smirk. _That's because he's weak and a fool_, she wanted to tell herself, but she could barely manage the thought. Right now she was so tired she was sure she could sleep for a hundred years. Maybe the ash-heads would be gone when she woke up. Maybe if the whole city fell asleep a palace of sand would rise up around them, like in the story.

'I know,' he said, and kneeled down in front of her, slowly, carefully, as if he were about to pick up a wounded bird. 'You never do.' His hand reached out, nearly touching hers. She grimaced, hesitated, and finally let her fingers touch his. His grip felt warm against her skin, and she couldn't remember when this had last happened, her letting him hold her hand like this. She must have been young enough to allow ribbons in her hair, and mother must have made them do it.

Nobody was making her now, and the feeling was not altogether unpleasant.

'I'll teach you,' he said. Brightly, almost. 'Whatever sifu Lan teaches me, I'll teach you.'

'Earthbending?'

Half an eye-roll. 'No, advanced… basket-weaving.'

'Your jokes are still terrible, dum-dum,' she said, but they both laughed, and then remained in place, her hand still caught in his, until the laughter cooled.

'Besides,' he added, 'it will probably take the two of us to beat those floating machines.'

She frowned. 'What are you talking about?'

Even in the shadows, she could tell he was surprised. 'What do you mean? They're right there in the spyglass.'

'No they're not,' she said, but their hands were already parting, and she stood up with a wipe of her hands on her trousers and a rush of blood back into her legs.

'Well, take a look, then.'

She ignored him and pressed one open eye against the spyglass's lens. Dust specks made her blink a few times. Her fingers fiddled with the creaky mechanism controlling the magnification. The last time she had done this in daylight, and she was sure the glass hadn't been _quite_ this dirty. A coppery scent filled her nose and mouth, as if she'd just stuck her face in two fistfuls of coins. Still, she was sure she had it now: the spread of the city, the houses small like rows of toys, the Fire Nation lines, and—

That must be what Zuko was talking about, those little oval pinpricks floating in the night sky above the scarlet plague-circle. _Paper lanterns_, she thought at first, but of course that was impossible. Mathematics had never interested her, but she knew enough to calculate scale and distance. Those things had to be much bigger than the biggest kite. Bigger than a house. As big as a street, maybe. Airborne as if it were the most natural thing in the world, instead of impossible. She swallowed, the sides of her throat rubbing together like sandpaper, and pictured a giant mechanical spider-fly moving across the city, crushing stone underneath its blade-bristled legs, releasing a flock of fire-breathing birds bred for biting and tearing. She shook the image away as she pulled back from the spyglass and stood up. It was—

_frightening_

—stupid, anyway.

'They must be some kind of war machine,' she said.

'That's what I said. Did you seen them before?' Zuko asked.

'No. But I'm not worried,' she added quickly.

He shrugged. 'Whatever. We should probably head back home.'

She didn't argue. The lines from the book floated up again as they walked towards the stairs and she held them close like a prayer bead or a balance stone, repeated them in her head like a mantra. _Let the rocks on the ground be your army. Let the pebbles be your arrows. Let every speck of dirt and every grain of sand besiege your enemy._

Above them, the moon was a lidless, unseeing eye.

:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:

TBC...

* * *

><p><strong>NotesDisclaimer:** _It shouldn't be like that, so still, happening while people ate dinner or tuned sounding stones or walked dully to the market._ — paraphrased from WH Auden's _Musée des Beaux Arts_


	7. Switch: Stone Heart: Part Two

**Switch: ii. Stone Heart**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom:** _Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Characters/Pairing(s):** Azula, Ursa, Zuko, Ozai; gen

**Rating:** M

**Summary:** Earth Kingdom!Azula AU. Ba Sing Se falls in a hail of fire when she is thirteen, and the Lady Zula escapes with her brother and mother. Zula swears retribution… but before she can have her vengeance, she has to stay alive in a war-torn land. Very, very loosely based on the _Snow White_ fairy tale. Rated M for violence, warfare, death, and other mature themes. Written for **au_bigbang** 2012.

**Word Count:** 26,800

* * *

><p><em><span>Two<span>_

* * *

><p>'Wake up! Wake up!'<p>

'Wha'?' Her mouth and eyes were leaden with sleep. Something shook her and she snapped awake. A pile of fabric tumbled off the mattress as she scrambled out of the bed.

'Take only what you can carry.' Her head turned towards the voice. The man standing in the bedroom's doorway wore the uniform and hat of a Dai Li, but she was sure he couldn't have finished his training yet. He looked like he was barely old enough to grow a beard. 'I am Agent Choi, Lady Zula. I will protect you, but we must h—'

The floor shook. Stone dust rained from the ceiling. There was still a low, distant rumble as Agent Choi took a step into the room. 'We must leave now.'

Zula began slipping on the clothes someone had thrown on the bed, thought coming too slow and thick to let her care that she was doing it in front of a man and a stranger. He wasn't looking at her, anyway; he kept stealing glances at the room behind him. Mother darted into the bedroom with Zuko in tow, two satchels hanging from her hands.

'Please hurry,' Choi said, and another rumble came, this time so close and loud Zula felt the ground under her feet shake and she had to bend the floor to keep herself from tripping over her own trousers. She heard a sharp chord of glass breaking.

The next few moments came only as splinters.

Thinking _It's too soon_, over and over. _It's only been a week. I haven't had time to_— The travel clothes put on so fast Zula felt fabric rip. Mother shoving things in her satchels, stuffing bracelets in Zuko's pockets and gold and ivory chopsticks down her sleeves once the bags were full. Agent Choi, grabbing Ursa's arm and shouting 'No time!' The last thing Zula did was dig up the book and shove it under her padded jacket. She didn't care who saw.

They rushed outside, her over-stuffed clothes jingling with each step. She would have laughed if her own hand hadn't clamped itself on her mouth. Mother's hand hooked her arm and dragged her forward.

'This way, Lady Ursa,' Agent Choi said, and guided them through the palace paths.

Outside the sky was burning, pale orange at midnight. There were screams, shouts, the roar of explosions. She looked over her shoulder, at the spot where she could see the city through a gap in the walls. The sky was dotted with the flying machines, fire pouring down from their bellies, filling the air with the stench of smoke. On the ground she could see something moving and the glint of metal; it took her a second to realise it was soldiers and tanks. Her side, because there was no war in Ba Sing Se, until there was.

Something jostled her and she nearly went down with a squeal. Coins spilled on the ground. She drew herself up, the earth shaking under her, ready to be launched at the enemy. Instead, Zuko took her hand, and a second later Agent Choi grabbed her and tucked her under one arm like she was an errant pet. Before she could protest, another explosion rocked the ground. 'Come on, there's no time to lose,' Choi said, and they rushed deeper into the palace complex. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a large flying machine, hovering fatly above the Inner Wall like an oversized firefly. Specks dropped from it in gracious peaswan dives. A second later flowers of debris and fire burst through the Wall, the explosions intense enough that she could feel them under her feet, even at this distance. Rock projectiles hit the flying machine, tearing it as if it were made of paper. Fire ripped through it, consuming it in an instant as it drifted towards the ground. _Good_, she thought, and felt a bout of nausea as the Dai Li agent released her. It was the smell, had to be the smell—it smelled like the entire city had decided to roast some—

The ground opened in front of them. 'Let's go,' Choi said, and ushered them down the ramp before he dropped into another stance to close the ground behind them.

Down, down, down. Father had made her memorise the entire layout of the tunnels under the city, but she had never been in this part, and right now, under the syrupy light of the glowing crystals, she couldn't quite remember where this area fit in. Mother clamped her hands on her and Zuko's shoulders and ushered them onwards. Choi opened and closed walls as they moved. The explosions grew softer and softer until they were only distant rumbles. After a while the crystals ended. Choi lit a small lantern.

Left, right, down, right, right, right. Sometimes they heard footsteps and Choi tensed until someone in a Dai Li or military uniform came into sight, sometimes with little clumps of civilians behind them. More than once they stopped to confer for a few seconds. Zula threw a contemptuous look at an older girl who sobbed quietly, not even bothering to wipe the tears and snot streaking her face.

After a while they stopped running into other people. Words clotted under her tongue. _Where are we going? Are we running away?_ Choi stopped abruptly and she nearly rammed into him. The words dropped back into her stomach.

'Shh,' he said. Zula looked around, trying to listen. They were in a corridor so deep in the earth the walls glistened with cold under the lamplight. Outside the bubble of light there was only darkness.

'I can't hear—' she began, but he shushed her again. She would have said something sharp, but still it got stuck in her throat. Now that they were no longer moving, pain and tiredness started to creep into her body.

Was there something—? Something faint. Footsteps?

Choi opened a thin wall hiding a chamber, small enough that the light from the lantern bumped right away into its walls. 'Wait here,' he said, and handed the lantern to Ursa.

'How about you?' she asked.

'I'll manage. I'll be right back. Don't bend this open for anyone,' he said, and sealed the alcove behind him.

They waited. After a while the alcove filled with the scent of burned oil. Mother rearranged the things in the satchels. Zula edged closer to where Zuko was sitting, his arms propped on his knees, and asked him if he was afraid. He stopped staring at the spot between his shoes long enough to say 'No.'

'Me neither,' she said, but without much satisfaction. All she could focus on was the lantern's spluttering light on the ground. Mother whispered 'don't worry, don't worry,' over and over, like the clicking of prayer beads.

Like it made any difference.

'We need to get out of here,' Ursa said, after a while. Zula looked up. She couldn't tell how much time had passed. Her body felt bloodless, the bones rusted, brittle with cold. Thirst came roaring back as she caught sight again of the damp filming the walls.

Mother stepped up to where the entrance had been and listened for a long time. Maybe there was no longer anything beyond the alcove, Zula thought, only miles and miles of stone, and they were the last people in the world, locked in the embrace of the earth with only the dying light for company. She found the thought almost comforting.

Ursa bended the wall open, returned for the lantern and stepped out. 'Come on,' she said. Zula followed, sinews and muscles creaking.

Footsteps sounded in the darkness of the corridor. Ursa stopped.

'Agent Choi?' she whispered, and raised the lantern. The darkness retreated no more than a fraction. Still the footsteps came, louder, _tap-tap-tap_. 'Agent Choi?'

A face lunged into view. Ursa almost dropped the lantern; the light bobbed. Scarlet-and-black uniform, glint of amber. _Strike_, the rush of blood told Zula, but her body remained stuck in place, as though she were watching a play—

_unable_

—forbidden to intervene.

'What are you doing here?' the Fire Nation soldier said. His accent sounded odd, Zula noticed, the thought floating placidly above her head. And his eyes—

'Stand back!' Ursa yelled, lantern raised like a shield in front of her. The soldier kept advancing on them.

'I'm not going to hurt you,' he said. His hand darted out to grab Zuko's arm. 'You will come with me now.'

A chunk of floor rose with Ursa's motion and swept the soldier's leg. He spun down, mouth open in surprise, but landed on his hand and knee and lobbed a fireball. Ursa dodged, dropped the lantern as it erupted in a plume of flame, dodged another strike that sunk into the wall with a burst of stone chunks, and jumped forward in the Camelephant Kick. The wall moved sideways to trap the soldier, who groaned and pushed a wave of fire towards Ursa. A handful hit her leg. She yelped but rushed through it, a lump of floor already rising at her side. A single strike sent it flying at the soldier's head. He tried to dodge, but his trapped leg caught him; his eyes widened before the rock hit him straight on, knocking him to the floor. His arms flailed. Fire spluttered in his hands. Zula could barely see him with her mother's body in the way, but she could see Ursa's hands rise again and the rock slab lift off the soldier's head before coming down again, harder. There was a strangled yelp and a loud crunch, like the sound of someone stepping on a snail-beetle. The soldier's body bucked once, twice. His hands twitched again, but this time only wisps of smoke rose up.

Ursa drew back, panting. Her right leg dragged a little, and Zula could see a patch of blistered skin where the fire had torn through her mother's trousers. On the ground, the soldier stilled. Zula took a step forward, her body suddenly free. Her innards knotted uncomfortably.

'Don't look,' Ursa said, and inched forward in a crouch until she was next to the body. She began rifling through the uniform. 'Zuko, get our satchels, there are things here we can use.'

Zuko remained still, the light from the lantern on the floor making him look a little jaundiced.

'Zuko,' Ursa repeated, and this time he moved.

Zula took another step. A necklace had spilled from her mother's clothes and one of the beads lay next to the body, close to where the neck disappeared under the rock. There was a little spill of blood, looking almost like oil in the firelight, much smaller than Zula would have anticipated. She stared at it as if it contained some great secret. Here and there, it was dotted with pink-stained whitish flecks. The air was full of the smell of smoke, but underneath there was a faint thread of salt. A hand twitched again, disjointed. She froze in place but mother ignored it as she unhooked the pouch on the body's waist. Then the body stilled. You couldn't mistake it for sleep, Zula was sure; there was some limp absence there, like in a rag-doll left in a heap on the floor. _I could have done that_, she thought. _I_ should _have done that_. Bile pooled under her tongue.

Her head whipped up. There were more footsteps somewhere in the tunnels, coming in their direction. 'Come on!' Ursa said. In an instant she had retrieved the satchels and the lanterns and was ushering Zula and Zuko forward. 'Come on!' she hissed again, and bended the corridor walls shut behind them.

Soon the other footsteps faded and there were only their own as they moved deeper into the maze. Soon Zula stopped thinking of the soldier and how her mother—

_how was it_ her?

—had dealt with him. There were only walls and ground and ceiling, constant grey-green rock. All she could think of was the map she had memorised, and after a while she stopped trying to match it to what she was seeing. A maze with a monster lurking inside it. Later still the map unravelled, blurred under the sweat pricking her eyes. The pain in her feet faded into a dull ache. It felt like they had been walking forever, the labyrinth of tunnels stretching to fill the world. If they ever emerged there would be only a rain of fire and a plain of ashes.

'Where are we going?' she asked.

Ursa didn't slow down. 'Out.'

'And then?'

'I don't know.'

'Where is Agent Choi?'

'I don't know.'

After that Zula didn't say anything.

The water in the dead soldier's flask was the first thing to run out, split between the three of them. Zula didn't feel hungry, but she couldn't help but feel a tightness in her belly when mother bended a door into a hidden cache of food only to find out it had been cleaned out already. Only a few scraps of dried fruit and meat, so tough it was like biting into leather, remained behind. Still, once Zula swallowed her share, hunger rushed back like an eel-dog in the last stretch of a race, overtaking pain, overtaking thirst, overtaking even the stiffness of exhaustion in her muscles. The dried peaches felt like she'd swallowed a stone.

The last thing to run out was the oil in the lantern. Mother had carefully dosed the additional oil they had taken, and for a while Zula had tried to measure time by it. She had no idea, however, of how fast lamp oil burned, if they had been walking for five hours, or fifteen, or fifty. They stopped as the flame began stuttering, darkness rippling around them as the light shrank. The moment they stood still pain ebbed back into her feet.

'We need fuel,' Ursa said. Held under her chin, the lamplight made her face look like a drumskin stretched over bone.

'Our clothes,' Zula said. Mother shook her head.

'No, they'd just smother the flame. We need something like oil, or wood, or—'

'Paper?' Zuko asked.

Zula looked at him.

'Zula has paper.'

_No_. He must have seen her stow the book away.

'Give it to me,' mother said.

Zula said nothing, suddenly very aware of the press of the book's corner against one of her ribs.

The flame blinked in its death throes again. 'If you don't give me the paper,' Ursa said, 'we'll be in the dark, and I'm not sure if I can find our way in the dark, do you understand?'

The words were hard, but they weren't what made Zula reach wordlessly into her jacket and pull out her father's book. It was her mother's face, shadow-pared, the eyes turned from green into twin shards of basalt. It was as if the soft, clucking-with-disappointment face her mother had worn on the surface were no more than a mask of flesh, something to be torn away in the underground.

Ursa fed the book into the lantern, page by page. As they walked Zula pictured the words and the images, sighing in the thread of smoke. After half a book's length—it was easier to measure time in chapters—they began moving upwards again, the rise in the ground almost imperceptible at first. They were a handful of pages away from the end when the rumble started, soft, then louder and louder. They must be close to the river, Zula thought: the walls were furry-green with moss.

The lamp went out again, but this time Ursa did not seem to care. 'Follow my voice,' she said. 'We're getting out.'

Zula inched forward, guiding herself by touch.

'This way.'

Rock moved and parted, and under the noise Zula could hear her mother's breath. She was bending them an exit, Zula realised, but the thought was stillborn. All she could focus on was on following her mother up the pitching, rising ground, the cloud of dust stinging her eyes and nostrils. She couldn't even wonder about her mother's earthbending training; until tonight—

_last night last week_

—Ursa had never used it for anything, or at least not anything that _mattered_.

A cold slap of water wrung out a shriek. The ground was slippery, but she kept moving, first walking, then crawling on all fours, clawing upwards through the mud and the dark. Sunlight opened in front of her. Half-choked, she went on, hands scrabbling for purchase, and finally squeezed out of the ground, slick with mud.

She brushed her hair away from her face and looked around, squinting in the sudden sunlight like a wolf-bat. They were in the river bank, outside the Outer Wall, wedged between the stone edge of the pier and squat fishing huts.

Around them, the world had gone mad.

The locks controlling and protecting the river flow as it exited the city, slabs of stone so large she felt a little dizzy looking up at them even at this distance, had been partly blown up. Boat-sized wedges of rock had fallen into the water. The locks were half-open, holes ripped into them, gears the size of houses spilling out like the innards of a dead animal. The stretch of water—silver still in the autumn light; the sun was indifferent—cradled burning ships. A sunken hull floated upside down. Beyond it, a gutted barge had burned so thoroughly only a few tongues of flame remained in the crumbling black wood. Zula took half a step forward. One of her shoes made a squelching noise. An enormous cloud of smoke filled the air above Ba Sing Se and beyond the Wall there were still sounds of battle, not the clear ringing she had pictured before, but the sound of a landslide, a thick, muddy sound that made her bones ache. She looked back at the water, stained here and there with dark patches, dotted with debris.

No, not debris, she realised. _Corpses_. One of them floated facedown only a few yards away, flesh burned to scarlet and black flowers. Under the water, limbs looked bloated, skin bleached into grey. The air was full of that sweet, roasting goat-pig smell, so strong a fist of hunger clenched inside her again and for a moment she was sure she was going to be sick. Starbursts of colour filled her vision. She rubbed her face, turned back to her mother. Out of the corner of her eye she could still see the plain beyond the river, crowded with Fire Nation encampments. A huge throng of soldiers and tanks and siege engines still poured into the breached city, covered the ground like a mass of stinger-ants. They had already won, she realised. Otherwise they would not be so orderly.

'Come on,' Ursa said. Zula followed, and tried not to breathe in the scent. She was sure lye soap and nearly boiling water would not be enough to get rid of it.

The hillock next to the river bank was, at least, not crawling with soldiers, so there was no one to stop them as they darted around the pilings pock-marked with water and barnacles, up the thorny bushes and the deserted fishing huts with their unkempt walls and windows like gouged eyes. As they climbed up a winding path the sole of Zula's shoe ripped open and tipped her out of balance. She straightened up, ready to bat away any offer of help, but instead of a hand, a shadow fell upon her. She spun around.

A lizard creature stared at her, its head larger than hers. The tip of a forked tongue darted out and vanished in a wink. Zula looked up at the Fire Nation soldier riding the thing, his face hidden behind the skull-like visor. A speartip winked at his side.

More of the ash-heads' repulsive creatures clambered towards the three of them. In an instant, they were surrounded. The lizard things snorted, wisps of smoke rising from their nostrils; vertical eyelids blinked. There was no point in fighting, Zula knew, and forced her muscles to relax a fraction. Mother raised her hands, but of course that did not prove she had no weapons; the soldiers remained watchful. Most of them had their visors up and Zula could tell—she almost doubted it at first—quite a few were women, even if she could barely see the swell of breasts and hips under the padded uniforms.

'We won't hurt you,' one of the women said. Same words, same lilting, clipped-edge accent. _Can't they say anything else?_ Zula thought. _They're like talking automatons_. Yes, she could believe that—that all the Fire Nation soldiers were like big clockwork toys—

_bloodied gears spilled_

—who wouldn't stop hacking and slashing until they came unwound or their springs rusted.

'We know you're civvies—civilians,' the soldier corrected herself, as if they were too stupid to understand. Her lizard mount snorted, skittered. She reigned it in. 'You have to come with us right now.'

Before Zula could react, her mother's hand clamped on her arm. The three of them climbed the hillside, boxed in by the lizard-creatures. Zula looked at the ash-heads from under her eyelashes. Their faces were expressionless, but behind her she could hear chatter, the unworried sounds of someone talking about the weather, or the roads, or travel. As he stepped over a rock, Zuko slipped back and one of the lizard-things nudged him forward. Ursa pulled him to her side. Zula was sure that she could hear a clap of laughter.

They emerged into a stretch of scrubland where a large number of tents had already been set up like fungus sprouting after rain. The noise deepened. A crowd of people was fenced in by a regiment of soldiers, metal chains as thick as her arm, huge pots heavy with flame. There was shouting, crying, the braying of animals. A rhino mount growled behind her and she startled. A spray of saliva and chewed-up hay hit her. She edged away from the thing, turned back to the crowd as the soldiers pushed them towards one of the tents. Most of the faces were blank, shades of bronze and brown rendered identical by ash. An eye peered at her from a layer of stained bandages. Further ahead, a soldier pushed a woman towards the barriers. She cried out at the blow and sent a chunk of stone flying towards him. In a second, a knot of soldiers were upon her. Flames rippled up. When the soldiers pulled back, the woman was bound in an elaborate trap of metal shackles, mud-matted hair hiding her face from view.

Ursa whispered something Zula couldn't quite make out and pulled her closer. The mounted soldiers boxed them in tighter, hiding almost everything from view. Zula tried to crane her neck to see, but everything was blocked but the noise and the smell: the sour-sweet smell of burned flesh was muffled by the smoke from the fire pits and the stink of animals.

She could still feel it.

The mounted soldiers herded them towards a patch of land next to a tent, then rode away. Before Zula could do anything, another woman in Fire Nation armour strode towards them. She wasn't wearing a helmet, so Zula could see her brown eyes, the hair pulled back into a tight knot. She probably would fit in almost any place in the Earth Kingdom—the stray thought was uncomfortable, and Zula thought back to the few lessons she'd had about the Fire Nation, how it had filled up with people who had not minded the ravages of the heat and the jungle and angry volcanoes, who had not minded leaving their ancestral lands in search of some feverish, lawless dream of gold. Losing—

_dying_

—to such people was like being savaged by a pig-sheep.

'No injuries? Good, good,' the woman said, in a voice of someone examining heads of cattle. 'The Fire Lord will take care of you. Just wait until you get sorted out and get your papers.'

Ursa's hand shot out, grabbed the soldier's wrist. 'Please. Please just let us go.'

The woman's face hardened. A strike was coming, Zula could tell, and all of a sudden the ache and tiredness flowed away. _What if they find out who you are? Because they will, they will know what your names are, they will know who your father is_—

_was_

—_and you can't just pretend you're some merchant family and what do you think will happen when they_— Zula's muscles tightened into a bright point of pain. Under her skin, the blood felt like glass. She wasn't afraid, she couldn't be afraid, not afraid, not afraid—

'Don't be an idiot,' the soldier said, not bothering to hide the menace.

Ursa released her, dug hurriedly into one of her satchels. 'Wait.' Her hand emerged, bearing something wrapped in fabric. A sliver of green was visible under the cloth. 'This is an uncut emerald,' Ursa said. She was no longer begging. She was using the tunnels' voice again, her face forbiddingly empty. 'You have to know how much it's worth. I ask—' She didn't sound like she was _asking_. '—that you find a way to let us go.'

The soldier was silent for a while, twin green glints in her eyes. Finally, she pocketed the emerald with a quick grimace. 'Wait here,' she said, and walked away.

The three of them huddled in the tent's shadow, as if that would keep them out of sight. The fabric snapped in a sudden gust of wind, and Zula was sure she could smell sweet dough frying. She _wasn't_ afraid. She wasn't tired, or in pain. All there was right now was hunger, filling up her stomach, pushing painfully into her lungs, her throat. Her mouth would water if it weren't so dry her tongue stuck to its roof. 'Do you really think she's coming back?' she snapped. Zuko elbowed her. 'Shut up,' he whispered. She turned towards him, razor-words at the ready, but mother shushed them.

The woman soldier was walking back towards them, looking a bit more well disposed than before. The expression was disconcerting on an ash-head's face. 'Here,' she said, and pushed a sheaf of papers into Ursa's hands, the white bloodied with scarlet stamps. A corner was torn, as if they had been ripped out of someone else's hands. _Who cares?_ Zula told herself. She didn't. She _didn't_.

The soldier bowed to her, making a strange gesture with her hands. 'Welcome to the Fire Nation, citizens.'

:=:

They only stopped walking once the enormous throng of soldiers began to thin, having made their way through thickets and fields and streams and overgrown paths, the gaps in the networks of roads and fields that surrounded the city like planets circling a star. Mother let her satchels drop to the ground, then deflated against the trunk of a tree. Zuko limped a little, then dropped to the ground.

_I am the only one standing_, Zula thought, then looked at her feet. Something oozed from her shoes. She sat down on the grass—

_this shouldn't be here not like this clean grass old oak tree as if nothing had happened_

—and peeled off one shoe gingerly. The leather was worn in places, the stitching ripped here and there. Patches of skin came off from her feet, almost without pain. She tipped the shoes onto the grass; the ooze was blood. The other shoe fell apart as soon as she touched it. Her feet were streaked with mud, but even so she could see the blisters that had burst and bled then swelled again, the bruise-coloured crack running down one of her nails.

She still felt no pain.

'Your father is dead,' Ursa said, then lifted her face from her hands. 'I'm sorry.'

_Why? You didn't kill him_. The thought drifted over the grass, floated upwards. Zula considered laughing, but now the pain was coming, first in trickles, then gushes. Her throat felt like it was coated in broken glass.

Another thought, flitting after the first. _We need little stones for his grave. In a circle for eternity, in a square for strength_. Beyond the hillock, the plain still crawled with soldiers, but now they were in neater formations, marching into the torn city under black wings of smoke and ash.

'What are we going to do?' Zuko said. The ash on his face was streaked with tears, but he wasn't crying and his voice was still. Now that she thought about it, she'd never seen him cry. 'It's all—'

She wasn't crying either. Instead she floated leisurely above the pain, over this—

_stupid little_

—girl sitting on the grass, her bare feet bleeding, a bruise blooming on her shin, her eyes wide, her lips parted slightly, like a broken, surprised doll. _There was no time, don't you understand? I could have done it but it was only a week, there was no_ time_!_

'—gone,' mother said, and let out a bone-deep sigh. 'I know, I know—I. We'll manage. We'll get through—and I—' Ursa's voice cracked and she fell silent, her hands balled so tight Zula was sure she must be digging bloody furrows into her palms. 'It'll be… all right.'

She didn't sound like she was trying to convince them, only herself, so Zula neither talked back nor rolled her eyes. She could do neither, she suspected; her tongue felt like sandpaper, her eyes like marbles.

It wasn't real, the floaty, flitty thought decided. It couldn't be: they were sitting on grass that was just starting to yellow, a tree with reddening leaves. Here and there, she could see insects, tiny jewels scattered on the ground. It was impossible that they were watching the greatest city in the world burning alive only a few hours' march away, filling the sky with a cloud so dark and thick it blocked out the sun.

She tried:

_The Earth Kingdom has fallen._

No, the thought was too big. She had only seen the whole of the Earth Kingdom in maps, and so some little part of her had never quite believed it was wholly real. The mineral ink on the great maps, then: iridescent green marking the forests, the sinuous lines of rare cobalt blue. The true scarlet had not been retouched, and so it had faded. They did not trade for it anymore.

She tried again. _Ba Sing Se is gone_. No, that wouldn't do either. The ash-heads were savages and—

_red and white twitching on the ground_

—barbarians, but they were cunning enough. She was sure they meant to keep the city rather than burn it entirely to the ground. They did not care if they broke it. But they wouldn't annihilate it. Not completely.

Great-grandmother's mirror. No, that wouldn't do either. It had looked like an open, pupilless eye in its carved bronze and ivory frame, and some part of her had always found it—

_frightening_

—ugly. She didn't feel anything over its loss, over picturing its shards lying on the ground, maybe next to—

Father's books. The book he'd given her. She could feel the cover, still under her jacket, digging into her skin.

After their training sessions, father would let her drink some ginseng tea. He didn't care—_hadn't_ cared—for it, but it was her favourite. She thought of the cups with their decorated rim, the carving so small she was sure it had to be done under a magnifying glass. The sweet steam was gone. The cups were gone.

The magic wheel. She had never really had any friends, had never felt either the need or the lack, but she'd had no choice but to visit with other well-born girls her age. At Lady Tai's house they had been ushered onto floor cushions laid out in front of a stretch of white fabric. They were to watch a magic wheel, she was told, and at that she'd replied with 'There's no such thing as magic.' But it wasn't magic—it was a thing of levers and spinning wheels and mirrors and in the darkened room the white sheet soon filled up with bright, moving pictures: ostrich-horses, an earthball game in which the ball suddenly sprouted wings, one-legged, one-eyed creatures that turned into fish. She pictured the white fabric catching fire, the creatures consumed in a shower of burning scales.

The wall scrolls mother had painted. Those were gone, too. She wondered if, in the heat, they had wept ink.

All her inkstones were gone too.

So were the brushes.

She had not done much to suppress her disappointment when mother had given her a pair of embroidered slippers for her twelfth birthday. She didn't have to be disappointed anymore, since they were gone. So was the spa where mother had taken her. The bubbling mineral water would have bubbled with a boil instead.

The food carts around the spa, selling cakes full of layers of fruit cream. Those were also gone.

Along with the pillars holding up the tram tracks, blown up in a shower of dust.

The pins she used to hold up her hair as she braided it.

The green curtains around her bed.

Gone.

She barely noticed her mother pulling her and Zuko into her arms. Zuko hugged Ursa. Zula didn't, but she didn't fight her embrace, either.

But she didn't cry.

She wouldn't.

She never did.

:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:

TBC...


	8. Switch: Stone Heart: Part Three

**Switch: ii. Stone Heart**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom:** _Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Characters/Pairing(s):** Azula, Ursa, Zuko, Ozai; gen

**Rating:** M

**Summary:** Earth Kingdom!Azula AU. Ba Sing Se falls in a hail of fire when she is thirteen, and the Lady Zula escapes with her brother and mother. Zula swears retribution… but before she can have her vengeance, she has to stay alive in a war-torn land. Very, very loosely based on the _Snow White_ fairy tale. Rated M for violence, warfare, death, and other mature themes. Written for **au_bigbang** 2012.

**Word Count:** 26,800

* * *

><p><em><span>Three<span>_

* * *

><p>Of the time after that, she barely noticed anything that wasn't hunger and cold. They moved towards the setting sun and southwards, more or less, because when they stopped by a lake to wash and drink—the water was so cold Zula was sure it was going to shear her skin clean off—mother said they were going to go to the Tang Bay region.<p>

Zuko stopped in the middle of putting his tunic back on. Back home they would never have done such a thing, but they wouldn't have slept on the hard ground either, or rooted in bushes for berries and eggs. 'Isn't that… you know, occupied by the Fire Nation?'

'Yes, it's a stolen province. One of their colonies,' mother said, and wrung the jacket she'd been washing. It looked stiff with cold.

_Everything's one of their colonies now_, Zula thought. Even the pine trees around them. Even the sky, cloudy with incoming winter.

'It's far away from Ba Sing Se,' Ursa said as she hung the jacket to dry on a low-hanging branch. Zula thought the trees looked even damper than their clothes. 'Nobody will look for us there. And it's safe.'

Zula shook out the water from her trousers. Her bare legs were shivering with cold, but her stomach held all her attention. It felt like someone had dug a hole inside her belly, and when she saw silvery shapes darting in the green water, all she could think about was diving in and grabbing them with her bare hands, then biting into the still-wriggling flesh. 'And then what?' she said.

'Then we'll figure it out,' Ursa said, and for a moment Zula was reminded of how her mother had been back in Ba Sing Se, always acting as if good manners solved everything. As if not pretending everything was _nice_ was like soiling a rug.

'You couldn't even grab us warm clothes when we left,' Zula said as she stepped away from the lake.

'_Shut up_,' Zuko hissed at her under his breath.

'Well, I'm _sorry_,' Ursa snapped, with a slap at the wet jacket. Zula froze in place. No, that was—

_head crushed under stone_

—not _nice_. 'I've never had to flee a falling city before. I apologise for not having behaved to a sufficiently high standard, daughter. Now stay here, if it's not too much of an _imposition_.'

Zula looked away, each word stinging her face like a slap.

'Give her a break,' Zuko said, his voice dark with irritation.

_Did you not notice? The world is not out to give anyone a break, Zuzu_, she wanted to say, but instead said nothing.

'She's our mother,' he said, then—maybe he was smarter than she thought—added, 'she's just trying to look out for us.'

I_'m trying to look out for me_, she thought, then wished mother had slapped her, that she'd needled Zuko enough to hit her, that she'd find a way for them to finally send her away. Then she'd walk back to Ba Sing Se and find a way to pull down the earth over the head of the Fire Nation general. Or wait until their king himself came marching into his newly-conquered city, then crush him under a boulder if it was the last thing she did before being burned to death.

But they didn't send her away. Instead they kept moving away from the city, and soon the image of the bloodied and bowed king of the Fire Nation—she didn't know what he looked like, so his face was always just shadow framed in flame—was pushed and pressed on by the always hunger, the constant weight of the cold. Food seemed to consume her every waking thought, to gnaw at her soap-bubble sleep. The precious objects they had brought with them didn't stretch far. Gold wasn't worth much when the roads were still clogged with armies and the thousands fleeing the burning fields of Ba Sing Se. Once, they traded a bracelet inlaid with pinpricks of emeralds for a small bag of dried meat, tough as gravel and not nearly as tasty. Soon after that one of their satchels was taken when they slept in a refugee camp, under the eyes of a regiment of Fire Nation soldiers. The three of them were wedged against the wall of a shed, mother on the outside, Zuko against the wall, she in the middle, huddled under a single holey blanket. She didn't even mind the lice, or the stink of too many bodies packed together.

Zula's sleep had long since become as thin as the greasy film on soup, so she sat up in an instant once she felt the bag propped under her head slip away. She looked around. Only sleeping bodies, soldiers, a few people sitting up. 'The bag! The bag! Where's the bag!' All around them people stirred awake. Mother sat up, turned to her. 'Someone stole our bag!' Zula hissed, ready to jump in pursuit. Hunger and tiredness were making her light-headed. She was sure they would also make her fast.

'Shut that bloody girl up!' someone hissed.

'Leave my sister alone!' Zuko yelled, then fell silent. The man who had spoken was sitting not far from them, and even propped up each breath came out in a wheeze. His legs ended abruptly at mid-thigh.

Mother covered Zula's mouth with her hand. 'Shush, now just be quiet, go back to sleep.'

She pulled back. 'But the bag!'

'Never mind the bag, just be quiet, pretend you're asleep.'

She settled down, stewing. Her eyes flew open as a soldier walked past, then closed again. 'We have the papers,' she whispered into mother's hair. It smelled of sweat and dirt.

'Then they'll burn even better than us, won't they?' mother grumbled.

Mostly they searched for food in the woods, staying off the roads to avoid Fire Nation soldiers, fighting the incoming winter inch by inch. They bended through the earth in search of wild turnip-radishes, scoured the trees and bushes for the nuts and fruits that hadn't yet been withered by frost, set traps for wild animals. A lot of the time, it rained. Sometimes it would snow, but at least it was only a flurry, an inch or two that would melt even in the pale sunlight. Zula wondered if the Fire Nation had scorched the earth so thoroughly even the snow was kept at bay.

She forgot the calendar she had learned to paint in another lifetime, copying it from the great zodiac wheel that probably no longer existed, its jewelled eyes permanently blinded. Now she measured time by food. The time they found a puddle of white grubs under a stone. They'd tasted almost as good as the delicate, flaky pastry and the gooey filling of berry cakes. The time Zuko accidentally disturbed a burrowing badger-deer and she ended up snapping its neck with a rock. She and her brother drew back, panting a little. Zula looked at the open, empty eye, the protruding tongue, and felt a wave of sickness rise. She didn't throw up, of course; she couldn't afford to. Afterwards mother skinned and dressed it with a flint blade as if she'd done it a thousand times before. They managed to get a fire going and roasted it over the hot stones. They ate everything, down to the offal, down to the torn tongue. Then they took the fur.

At least she didn't have to worry about her monthlies. They had stopped coming, and mother had to explain it was because of the hunger. She didn't mind.

At least she wouldn't be tempted to lap up the blood.

The time they waited—not a motion, not a sneeze, not a broken twig—for bandits to move on from a clearing, so they could root through what they'd left behind. Zula's bladder felt so swollen she was sure she was going to cry out. But she didn't, and she forgot the pain as soon as they found a bit of meat still remaining in the pig-hens carcasses left behind.

The time they came across a military outpost guarding a pass, a half-burned Earth Kingdom banner still hanging from one of the walls. The grass and trees around it were charred into petrified ash. The air was full of beetle-flies. 'Stay here,' Ursa said, and edged towards the wall. She didn't need to bend it open; one corner had a ragged hole. Zula started to follow until Zuko grabbed her arm. She turned to glare at him. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of something grey and swollen. A smell of rotten fruit and week-old fish hit her. She stopped trying to get out of her brother's grip. He let her arm drop.

She forgot all about it once mother came back, arms streaked with ash but carrying half a bag of rice, flour mostly untouched by weevils, and a box of dried cherry-plums.

The time when the snow began coming in earnest, blanketing the ground with silence, hanging icicles from the trees, making the world sharp with ice, numb with cold. She pictured herself as an animal wandering in the woods, covered in patches of fur, black hair dusted white, mouth stained red by blood. Smoke in the distance. They stopped, wary. But it wasn't the Fire Nation. It was a small farm, set upon a meadow like a gift from a friendly spirit. They snuck into the barn, where a few wooly-cows stared dumbly from their stalls. It was warm and dry and there was straw, and before she and Zuko fell asleep, she was sure the best smell in the world was hay and manure.

Her eyes snapped open even before she heard the voice. 'Come out of there.' She shook her brother's arm off her—she hadn't been nestling into him, _not really_—and scrambled towards the stall's opening. Hay prickled her skin, got into her mouth and nose. A single needle-thin beam of light came from the barn's entrance, but it was enough to see the blizzard, the human shape at the door carrying a crossbow's winking eye.

'Please forgive us,' Ursa said, standing, hands up. 'We are not bandits or thieves. We just wanted a warm place to sleep. We can work—we can do any—'

'We?'

Zula peered around the edge of the stall and felt Zuko do the same thing. The light struck her eyes, but she didn't pull back. Even with the glare, she could see the woman's stance soften. Still, when she spoke again, the crossbow remained pointed and Zula could hear its string being pulled tauter.

'Hmmph. Are you benders? Yes?'

_She's afraid_, Zula thought, and then, on its heels, _we could kill her and take whatever we want_. The thought was dispassionate; it sat in the air like the name of a city, a diagramed animal. They had come across other farms before, emptied out. In one of them a clutch of pickens had gone feral, nesting in the tall grass, in the shelter of an orchard where frost-blighted fruits lay on the ground. The three of them had eaten well that day. In another they had found charred remains hanging from a fencepost, something that had perhaps been an arm bound by a metal chain that glinted softly in the hazy, snow-flurry light.

Not all the ghost places had been gutted by fire or by weapons, though.

Sometimes it had been earth.

Ursa's hands remained up. 'Yes. We can hel—'

'I'm not.' A pause. 'I guess you can work for me.' She lowered her crossbow a little. 'You can stay in the barn if you want, just don't bother my wooly-cows.'

They stayed in the farm for a few weeks, working from before the sun rose to after it set, but what Zula remembered wasn't the frostbite in her fingers, or the constant, dull ache in her back. It was a roof and the steamy breath of wooly-cows with their brown, liquid eyes, and the scarf the white-haired woman pressed into her hands, and honeyed apples, their skins crisp and almost too hot to bite into.

Once they moved on she dreamed of dumplings, ginseng tea, slivers of roast turkey-duck marbled with fat. She dreamed of throwing away a jacket just because it had got torn. She dreamed of hot stones under silk sheets and mattresses full of down.

She didn't know how long it took them to reach the river that would take them to Tang Bay. The whole winter, she thought. Who cared about time when you drank rainwater and melted snow, and wore the fur of freshly-butchered beasts, and had wolf-lynxes for company? Even so, slowly she became less animal. When they reached the plains, her hair was almost respectable again, no longer a tangle of pine needles and dirt. When they had gone into the woods Ursa had taken a knife and chopped off the bottom halves of Zula's braids, as if she were a child. Zula had found herself not minding. The hair falling on the cold-hardened ground was not her adulthood. It was only the remains of some other, dreamed life. 'Once we get to the Huang Jin and find a ship,' mother said as they walked down a road too small to matter, 'we'll get away from the northeast. Away from the war.' Zuko seemed pleased at that, or as much as he could, anyway; her brother never looked pleased. Zula didn't bother to hide a sharp draw of breath. There was no away from the war, there had never been away from the war, away from the ribs visible under her skin and the mud as high as her shins. There was no war in Ba Sing Se because there had never been a Ba Sing Se, embroidered dresses, cakes covered in powdered sugar, magic wheels. There were only pages—

_bodies_

—burning up one by one.

They hit water before they were supposed to.

All of Zula's knowledge about the Huang Jin river did not extend beyond the thick, meandering line and the island-clogged delta in maps she was starting to forget. Even so, she knew they were still miles away from its banks when they reached muddy water that half-drowned tree trunks, pooled between hillocks, turned hamlets into archipelagos of stone and thatch and tile. The three of them came across more and more people, now that they weren't deep in the woods. Most of them were travelling in the opposite direction, getting away from the rising waters. Ursa nodded politely at their warnings, then moved on. 'Strange winter,' a man pulling a handcart behind him said. Rain pealed on tree leaves and the wet ground. He was talking about the weather, Zula knew: the snow had been thin, the thaw early and swift. This far south they were getting flowers, premature and sickly, pale fruits that hung from trees like little corpses. Only it wasn't just the weather, she was sure. Maybe the war had injured the land itself, the sky, the clouds.

Strange winter.

It didn't take long for the flood to become impassable, even with bending. In a half-drowned village they found a man and an older woman—probably his mother, Zula thought; she had the same brown eyes and the same thin, hard mouth, like a gash in a rock face—loading up a sailboat. 'Going north?' Ursa asked. Even standing on high terrain the water sloshed up to their knees, stretched blackly into the horizon.

'No,' the man said as he scampered across the roof, then leaned down to pull on some bit of rigging. 'South to the islands.' Zula couldn't recognise his accent.

'Us too,' Ursa said. 'Trying to catch a ferry. Head west.'

For a moment the silence was broken only by the ripple of the wind on the water, the splash of something diving. The woman nodded to the man. He pulled on another rope. 'Go on, then.'

For most of their trip, Zula ignored the boat and its complicated dance of snapping sailcloth and cables and wedged herself out of the way, staring at the water. There was so much of it even the air smelled a muddy green. Here and there things broke the surface: tree tops, hillocks, roofs. A group of ostrich-horses paddled in search of higher ground, neighing, wings flapping. Once a shadow almost as big as the boat slid right past it. Zula drew back a little and her elbow bumped into an oilcloth bag. The top of a ragdoll's head and a green hem peered out. It was a very small sleeve, she realised, and said nothing.

Night came and she and Zuko huddled in the prow so they could bend away any submerged debris before it ripped a hole in the hull. Lamplight turned the foam yellow. When he leaned into the water to push a floating, uprooted tree away, Zuko sliced his palm open on a branch. 'It's nothing,' he said, but mother still scrubbed his skin raw until the corner of his mouth twitched. The old woman nodded once in approval, a string of smoke rising from her pipe.

'It's bad water,' she said.

After a while the water became deep enough that Zula was sure they were in the river proper. Even in the weak light she could see where the dark water gave way to a tawny mud colour, as if someone had spilled two different bottles of ink. Fog rose up, smothering the air with cold, and in the darkness there was only the occasional splash, the sounds of something slicing through the water, the cry of a lone bird. Neither she nor Zuko slept. Instead they remained in the prow, huddled under a single blanket, thin against the damp. She could feel his body shivering against hers, and thought that maybe the water's badness had infected him with a fever. 'You need this more than me,' she said, and made to twist out of the blanket. 'Unlike you, I am _fine_.'

He held the edges of the blanket so that she couldn't get out from under it. 'You don't call me Zuzu anymore,' he said, his tone blank.

She didn't answer. In truth, she hadn't noticed. Maybe it was just another thing from that Other life, that dreamed life shed like so much dead skin.

'I thought maybe you'd figured out it also applies to you,' he said.

He wasn't making a joke, but still her face grew hot. 'Did you take fifteen years to realise that?'

'Did you spend thirteen _not_ realising?'

She opened her mouth, closed it again, and let herself remain under the blanket.

It was still night when something broke the horizon. At first she thought it was a fist of fire, and she—

_trembled_

—tensed. But soon, as they drew nearer, the fire resolved into a thousand pinpricks of light. It was an island, its hulking shape the size of a small city, floating above the waters. Every street light, every lamp, every lantern seemed to have been lit, and a swarm of ships, from sleek sailboats to flat-bottomed ferries, surrounded it. The noise reached them just as the sides of the larger boats became the walls of a narrow canyon. There were shouts, a constant peal of bells, the bellowing of ship horns. Their sailboat wound its way towards the dock as a large ferry got under way, a trail of foam behind it. 'Come on,' Ursa said as soon as their boat dropped anchor almost under a pier. Zula didn't look down as she got out of the boat and climbed. The boat swayed from side to side, the gap between it and the pier immense and bottomless, the steps slippery with river water.

Once all five of them were on the dock, Zula was quickly surrounded. She turned around and a heavy basket rammed into her side. She rammed back. 'Don't just stand there,' a woman yelled at her.

Before she could reply, a hand fastened on her arm. She looked up, into her mother's face. 'Don't wander off,' Ursa snapped. Zula tried to reply, but the press of the crowd dragged her onwards. Zuko glanced back. 'Shouldn't we wait for the—'

'They'll manage,' mother said, and dragged him closer. A gust of wind cut at Zula's skin, whipped up the hanging lights and made the ships bump into each other in the swell of water. She was sure she could smell smoke in the cold, starlit air. Banners snapped, the Earth Kingdom's flag above the pale stars of the northeastern city states. Their soldiers were here, she realised: here and there she could spot uniforms, the shapes of their snow buffaloes.

The three of them pressed onwards, towards where one of the soldiers stood directing people. A quick glance passed between her and Zuko and the two of them made the ground ripple in front of them, just enough to push a few people out of the way. 'What's going on?' Ursa had to shout to make herself heard above the crowd. 'We—'

The soldier turned towards them. In the syrupy light his eyes looked almost translucent. 'Get into your ship,' he said.

'We just got out—'

A gauntleted hand fell on Ursa's shoulder. 'Our armies are fighting the Fire Nation in the mountain passes upriver. If the dam breaks, the Huang Jin islands will be under ten feet of water. Get into a ferry. _Now_.'

They moved back towards the docks, pushed forward in a new wavelet of people that had just been disgorged by one of the streets. As they hurried, Zula tried to look back, craning her neck so hard her bones hurt. Behind her there was only a mass of people, the city's squares, streets and houses dug into the hilly terrain, stacked up several storeys high—but in the night beyond the island there was the scarlet-eyed glow of the Fire Nations airships, she was sure, tongues of fire deep in the mountains. She look forward again, to where one of the ferries stood with its hold doors lowered, looking like some enormous marine beast with its jaws open. No one was crying, she noticed. There was shouting but no one was screaming or scrambling in a mad panic. The war must have hardened them until they were all almost as fearless as her.

A sudden push of the crowd sent her spinning. For a moment she was blind, the air squeezed out of her lungs. She resurfaced, her mother's grip digging into her arm. 'Zuko!' Ursa yelled. 'Zuko!'

'Stop! Stop!'

Ahead of her, two soldiers had raised a wall of earth. A few people slammed against it. A couple more yards and she would have fallen into the water. 'Zuko!' Ursa shouted again, her fingers digging into Zula's arm so hard she was sure the skin was ripping.

'Mother! Zula!'

She stood on tiptoe, struggling to see above all the heads towering over her, then bended a chunk of stone up and stood on it. She looked around for the voice but all she could see was a bobbing sea of people, a string of lights, the tangle of ships in the docks. Finally—

_heat swelled in her chest_

—she caught a glimpse of Zuko, waving to them from the deck of a ferry. The ship, heavy with passengers, was already pulling away in a trail of yellow-tinged foam.

'We'll get to you!' Ursa shouted, and dragged Zula away, into the knotted line of people embarking into the nearest ferry. 'Hurry, hurry.'

The wind carried a groan, deep and distant as if the earth itself were crying out in pain. Above her, lanterns winked out, nearly pulled out of their ropes by the gale. There still weren't any screams, but she could hear a small child crying, breaths being drawn in. 'Get in,' mother said, and pushed her onto the loading ramp. The ship wobbled, the wood was slick under her feet. Through the gaps she could see the churn of dark water.

Pain struck the side of her face in a scarlet starburst before she realised the ship had bucked, yanking her away from Ursa and slamming her into the hold. A leg struck her head. A heel rammed into her side. The ship pitched forward again, and she slid down the floor. 'Mother!' she cried out, and struggled to get up, to see. Screams now, openly. Lights swung wildly, head-spinning. There was no earth here, no stone, only wood and metal. She kicked and elbowed, but the press of bodies was too heavy. She stumbled back against the railings, her lungs squeezed between iron and flesh and bone. A face pressed against hers; she saw only an eye, wide and white with fear.

'Stay where you are!' Ursa's voice, almost blurred out by the noise. 'Stay where you are, I'll find you, I'll—'

The roar grew louder and louder, making the air hum. The ship rocked from side to side, yanking her away from the railings in a rush of air and pain, then slamming her back so fast she almost—

_screamed_

—fell into the water. She heard splashes. Icy water slapper her face. She clung to the railings, eyes burning, muscles clenched so hard she was sure she felt her bones crack. She could see no more than a scrap of night, but even so she could see _it_, a wave of white foam as high as the walls of Ba Sing Se, riding down towards the island and the ship, screaming like some monstrous living thing, flecked with debris she was sure were trees, or houses. _The dam_. She felt oddly calm. _They must have blown up the_—

The wave hit. Around her the ship was nearly rent in two. Wood cracked. Metal screamed. The wave swept in, tossed her into the back of the ferry as if she were made of paper.

Silence.

Water like fire in her throat and lungs.

Shadows.

Zuko's ferry, rising as if it'd been grabbed by a giant hand, then smashing into another ship, breaking apart like kindling, swallowed up by the wave.

Noise tore through her eardrums. She screamed, half-drowned, scrambling for air and purchase. Her body slammed against the—floor? ceiling?—then was tossed back towards the railings. The metal ripped through her flesh and she tried to hold on, but her fingers closed on water and the water closed on her and everything went black.

:=:

She wasn't dead. Later she would try to put her memories together, and come to the conclusion that the river must have dragged her towards one of the smaller islands. She pictured herself with the swell of waters tugging at her body and clothes, her arm wrapped around a rock that had been a marker and which she must have pulled up as she half-drowned, a carpet of wheatgrass and submerged willows undulating under her legs.

For now there was only pain, weighing on her chest like a branding iron. It sharpened. Her body rolled—she _had_ one, shredded skin and cracked bones and nerves like wires of—

_fire_

—agony. She wanted to scream, but couldn't find her mouth, not in the dark. But she wouldn't anyway. Wouldn't.

'Breathe. Breathe.'

_Be quiet_. Water bubbled on her lips, sandpapered her lungs. Something was making a horrible, rasping noise, be quiet, be quiet, why won't you just _be quiet_? The branding iron still sat on her chest, but now it was an iron _dragon_, and she could see it even in the darkness, the eyes like fired-up coals, the fangs glowing red from the flame inside it. Molten metal trickled down in rivulets. The dragon's coils dug into her back.

The noise again, grinding her ears. It was in her throat, she realised, burning coals that rattled every time she breathed. The fire spread to her face, her arms, her stomach. She had never left the city, never made the trek south. Ba Sing Se burned and she burned with it. The smoke blackened her eyesight.

A cool trickle. She sucked at it eagerly, then her throat burned up again. The world rocked from side to side.

_Get up._

_What?_

Stonewings. The word floated up on the blackness, perfectly formed, each stroke like the bloody slash of a surgeon's tools. Stonewings, because their wings shone in the sunlight like precious stones. In the summer they'd come in from outside, flying in place and darning the air with their stinger. Stonewings, sewing up her flesh. She batted at them; the pain deepened.

_I told you to get up._

The black bloomed with bruises, purple, green, yellow. Eyes like chips of jade looked down on her, and she realised her own were open and fog-misted and aching. Her head flopped to one side. A row of beds stretched away from her, only not beds, not really, hammocks heavy with… rags? A shadow walked amidst the hammocks. It stopped here and there, and sprinkled sand. All of a sudden she was sure she did not want to look at it, but her head remained stuck, weighed down with iron balls. The shadow stopped, turned. A puff of dust settled around it. Under the hood, its face was—

_Father?_

She thought that the fall of black hair under the swaying ceiling was her father's, somehow unbound. But it was her mother's after all, set loose from its buns and braids. It writhed like snakes, like the planks in the ceiling, and they twirled and turned and turned and the dark spread across them a stain of water drip drip drip down the wall…

'—blank.' She coughed. Her lungs filled with rust; her body followed. The dragon's coils tightened on her flesh and all of a sudden the planks above her stopped swaying.

_I didn't expect this from you, my dear._

This time it really _was_ father, the last two words lobbed like a stone with sharpened edges. His face leaned over hers. Pale stars wreathed his head.

Like the Fire Nation's barbarian kings, whom she'd always pictured cloaked in flame, eyes two drops of scarlet in the sweltering dark. The air filled with the sour-sweet smell of burning flesh. Roasted goat-pig.

_Nothing to say for yourself, I see_, father went on. The skin on his face reddened, as if he'd just been struck, turned scarlet, began to blister.

_I will bury them._ '—bury them.' It came out as a helpless croak.

The fat under the skin on father's face started to melt, gobs of yellow in furrows of cracked flesh. _Did I teach you for this? Who was it who saw you had been given the jewel of talent, a rare stone that you find once in one hundred years? Who was it who taught you what no one else would?_

'You! You!' she cried out, the burning now under her tongue. Voices gathered around her, whispering 'shush, shush'. For a moment her father's face vanished and all she could see was a black starlit sky, the folds of a thin blanket. The air smelled of mould. Then he returned, brows and lashes seared off by flame, the peeling edges of his skin turning black. _Is this what you wanted all along? To lie there like a coward and a weakling? To hide your head in the sand when your enemies are at the gates? Were you instead thinking all the time about admirers, perhaps? About sticking their idiotic poetry in your sleeve? Living like a pampered pet off their kindness and indulgence? Hoping to throw yourself on their mercy?_ Flakes of burned flesh rained down. _Don't you realise everybody knows exactly what you are? Did you ever think you could make them feel love? Or pity? When a mooselion falls, all that's left is its enemies. Waiting first, like cowards. Disbelieving. Then coming forward to_ feed.

'You lost!' she cried, but it came out as a garbled scream. _You lost because you weren't the best, and that means there was something wrong with you, and if there was something wrong with you, then there's something wrong with me and_—

_Shut that bloody girl up!_

Something pressed against her, tighter even than the dragon's coils.

_We all belong dead_, father said from a tongue like a blackened root as his bones crumbled to ashes. Above her each star was a flying war machine, their mechanical bellies opening to birth a curse of fire.

The sky turned grey, then a dazzling white. The coils around her slackened, even if the burning went on. She began to feel limbs and fingers and toes again, through the pounding heat. She was on—a boat, it must be a boat. Laid out on the deck in a row of pallets and other bodies. Insects buzzed fatly above her. She tried to speak, but sand shifted inside her mouth. A sponge pressed against her lips, squeezed in a trickle of foul-tasting water. Her mother's face stared from above, blocking out the sun.

Her head flopped to one side, the crack of pain from the hard wood drowned out in the fever.

_Am I dead?_ It came out as a groan.

Zuko didn't answer. He remained sitting on the floor next to her, his bronze skin blanched to grey, water dripping off his hair and clothes. His eyes had turned entirely black.

_Does it hurt?_

_It's cold_, he whispered.

'Figures,' she whimpered, then yanked the thin cloth off her and pushed it towards him. _I told you you needed it more than me, dum-dum._ The cloth fell on the boards.

At times she realised she lived, and that she was ill, burning up with fever on the deck of a boat. She lifted her hand, brought it to her face. The fingers shook, the nail beds were bruised red and purple. A bandage snaked down her arm, coiled around her chest. Here and there it was stained dark with pus. At times the tightness would subside, and she would see deep canyons gouged into her flesh, still bright with blood. _My doing_, the dragon said, and dug its claws into her chest and arm again, sank its teeth into her throat. When it lifted its head, sinews and skin hung from its muzzle; a tongue, perfectly red, would snake out to clean its scales until they glistened, and its golden eyes would stare, unblinking.

When it ate her it would always save her head for last.

At times all she saw were the most dreadful _colours_.

Her mother talked, a sound like the buzzing of a scorpion-bee hive. White cloth flapped next to her. There was a trio from the Si Wong desert, still wrapped in the clothes they wore against the burning sands. _You're not real_, she thought, said in a mumble. _You were in a book, but they've all burned_.

'That girl is not long for this life,' a Si Wong ghost said. The sky around his head had the shiny hardness of a blue tortoise-beetle shell and the cloth on his back hung like two resting dragonfly wings. In a moment he would fly away, the tips of furry legs poking out from his clothes.

'—looked for him as long as I could.' Ursa's buzzing again. 'But I couldn't find him. I couldn't find him, and I had to stop, and I—' Fingers touched Zula's flesh, the tips made of burning ice. She gasped and tried to push them away. 'My daughter is all I have left.'

Water dripped from Zuko's closed fist. _She likes you now_. Father's voice, maybe. _Now it's not just obligation. Now she has no choice. Now you're weak and helpless and need so much and so you're becoming more attractive to her by the minute._ 'Try giving her this.' A liquid bitter as defeat was poured into her mouth. She choked, spluttered; still down it went.

'I don't believe in spirits,' a Si Wong ghost woman was saying. When Zula managed to turn her head towards her, the ghost woman had just finished putting a leaf in her mouth and was now chewing thoughtfully.

'No, they're real,' someone else said. 'I saw one once. It was a pillar of sand.'

_Not sand. It was a pillar of fire._

More ghost faces. Now her mother talked to another woman who wore polished teak bracelets the exact same shade as her skin. At Zula's feet, Zuko watched in silence. 'Are you just going to stand there and watch?' she tried to say. Instead the words bubbled in her mouth like the foam of a punctured lung. Zuko said nothing. The woman approached her, and up close Zula could see a row of white dots painted on her forehead. Maybe she was from one of the Water Tribes or some other strange, frozen country. _United against a common enemy_, she thought, and coughed until the world began to turn dark. When her body stopped shaking, she could tell the woman's eyes were green after all. The bandages were off. The woman probed the wounds with metal pincers, stingers made of steel. Her head shook all the while.

'Difficult case,' Zula heard. When the woman's face came back, so did the fire. She was sure she could smell her own flesh, roasting.

Rotting.

_I shouldn't have taught you_, father said. A chain bound his charred body. _You've lived a short and insignificant life, and you have done nothing for yourself, or your family, or your land. If you even come back, it will be as a being of no account._ Ashes fell from his mouth.

'No!' she screamed, and managed to hoist herself onto her elbows. The pain was all-consuming. 'I will live. Live.'

Mother at her side again, a cool cloth on her face, little nothings whispered into her ear. Zula sank into the arms encircling her. Her mind floated up, alighted on the great river.

_I can't be dead_. She could see the thought above her like a spirit moth, bright and fleshless, white and frail like chalk dust. _I haven't had my revenge yet_.

So she _would_ live.

:=:

After the fever broke, it took her perhaps a week, all told, to put herself back together. By this time they were in a small trade ship, taking up a cabin half-full of crates and huge stone jars, their wax-ringed corks greasy with oil. There was a narrow mattress wedged into one corner. Zula would spend each morning peeling off the bandages on her chest and arm, then—hardening her fingers until they'd stop shaking—she'd scour the mottled flesh underneath with a sliver of soap and a bamboo scrubber. Mother had done that for a while, she knew. Zula had taken over as soon as she managed to do it without sending the soap skipping across the floorboards. 'I can do it myself,' she'd snapped, her faced turned to the wall so that Ursa wouldn't see it grow hot with shame.

Once she was done, she would wash the bandages as thoroughly as she could in the half bucket of water, and glare at the yellow and red stains that would remain in the cloth. Not a lot of clean gauze that could be wasted on impromptu passengers. With the scum of algae on the river, not a lot of water, either.

Afterwards she was always too tired to do much but lie on the mattress, willing her flesh to mend, and trying to flex her muscles as much as she could. Ropes of pain bound her chest and left arm—her better one, to boot—but she forced her mind to ignore it, or at least to endure it. Once in a while her father would show up, not a fever-dream but a well-behaved memory. She had eaten up his scraps of training like a starving sparrowkeet picking at crumbs. Waiting hungrily for the times when he would be home and free, the times when no one would be watching, the times when she wouldn't be in a gaggle of court girls, covering mulberry paper with brush paintings, learning to make stone sculptures inside glass jars. They must have burned up. She could picture the writing desks, wreathed in flame, the snap of glass breaking. Painted cat-owls curling and blackening.

Maybe some of the other girls had burned up too.

_It doesn't matter_, she told herself as she forced her body to stand up and walk around the cramped cabin. She moved ungainly, like a ship swaying in a storm. Nausea swirled under her ribcage. Her training had barely gone beyond the essentials, but that did not matter either. She ran her fingers over the crates' seals. Linen, raw cotton, grey amber, dried fruits packed in straw. She made the stone jars spin slowly, making a grinding noise against the wooden floor. She would train herself. She would make herself hard as a diamond, untouched by weakness or sickness. Like the way her flesh was mending, clean but leaving ridged, hard lines behind.

A diamond was only a lump of coal that had been squeezed hard enough.

Sometimes mother would make her go into the deck for fresh air, and they'd sit in a shadowed corner where they'd be out of the way of the sailors. The river wound past towns, through scrubland and woods. Now it was hemmed in by bare red cliffs, as if it were carrying the last people left in the world. The only thing in the sky was the plume of smoke hanging off the stack. She'd been glad when she'd first realised the ship had a steam engine, like a Fire Nation machine. _Good_, she'd thought. _We should turn their things against them_. On that day the crew had unloaded merchandise in a town summited by a scarlet fortress, and she and mother had stayed in the cabin, huddling behind some of the crates. Zula had peered out through the bottom edge of the porthole. In the end, it had been pointless. No one had cared to search some insignificant trade ship, and if they had, Zula doubted they'd even know who they were, or bother much about it.

'Here.' The captain strode up to them and handed Ursa a roast fish wrapped in a flatbread, still smelling of coal smoke. Mother held it between the two of them and picked at the fish with her fingers, as delicately as if she were holding a pair of ivory chopsticks. Zula pulled her tunic tighter around herself without looking at the man's face. 'And some fresh bandages for the little girl.' He placed the roll of fabric on one of the barrels.

'We are much obliged to you,' mother said, but Zula didn't answer. For a moment she felt a spike of dislike for this man with his too-bright smile. He didn't notice, though. She was sure he was paying no more attention to her than he would to a pebble. Her dislike intensified.

Mother handed her a morsel of roast fish and an unwelcome memory bubbled up: Zuko giving her half a sweet ginger cake when she was small and mother had told him to share. She batted it away as she swallowed hungrily. She was always hungry now. And she wasn't _sad_. She didn't _miss him_. He was just someone she was going to avenge. Like she was supposed to.

'We are going to reach the old Tang Bay colony soon,' the captain said. 'Good trade there.' His smile didn't go away, but it turned even more brittle. 'Those ash-heads pay three times what the merchandise is worth,' he added. She pictured herself burying him to his neck in stone.

They arrived in the province's main port soon after, and no one noticed them as they exited onto the dock amidst an ocean of fish and crates and bales being disgorged from a row of ships. Zula saw a shoal of golden eyes, stiffened. A group of Fire Nation soldiers rode slowly past the docks on those horrible rhinos of theirs. A loose turkey-duck squawked and flapped away. Under Zula's feet, the earth quaked a little. 'Come on,' mother said, and hooked her arm in hers, pulling her into the crowd. 'Keep your head down.' As they started walking away, Zula saw Captain Hui throw a wink at them. She turned away, wrinkling her nose, and told herself it was at the stink of fish.

'I'm not going to stay here,' she said as they made their way through the market, pretending they were just two random citizens, looking at the wares. There was plenty to look at. The market tables were laden with things from papayas to plates to shoes to lobster-crabs in ice. The air smelled of sugar and cinnamon and spices, and the war was a world away, in some other, inconsequential place.

Doors were painted scarlet, and on the taller buildings, dragons curled on the eaves.

'Of course not,' mother said under her breath. 'We'll see if we can find a bit of land in a village. We'll stay in this province like we planned. So that—'

She fell silent. Her shoulders drooped. _You can't possibly think he's still_— The words nearly spilled out of Zula's lips. She could practically see them floating in the air. In front of that smiling seller at one of the stalls, with leaf-green eyes and a red, flame-shaped tie in her hair.

All of a sudden Zula realised that she did not know this woman next to her at all. She threw a sideways glance at her mother, at the face that had once been as round as hers but had been pared down by deprivation, at the strands of silver in the ebony hair, the fine lines in the corner of her eyes. The hand on Zula's shoulder had worn rings, once upon a time. Now it was hard with calluses.

Who was she? Where had she come from? She had never thought about her mother's life before she herself had come along. Ursa was just another woman from a good Ba Sing Se (but was she really even from Ba Sing Se?) family. A lady of leisure who concerned herself with her children and fine clothes and poetry and art and being perfectly cultured and elegant and polite, and was disappointed and afraid when her daughter wanted none of the same.

Not the woman who had known the layout of the tunnels under Ba Sing Se by heart. The woman who had killed and bribed Fire Nation soldiers with the ease of someone driving a hot spoon into soft cream. The woman who had known how to stay alive in the winter-ridden woods, who had rooted through a fortress of the dead without the slightest hesitation. _What if it's her?_ The thought was ill-formed, nearly hidden out of sight. _What if we don't have to hide because of who father was but because of who she_ really _is?_

'I—that's a good… plan,' Zula said awkwardly, and nestled the arm that had been dangling awkwardly between them against her mother's waist.

Ursa didn't smile, but her face softened a little. For a moment she looked almost the same age she'd been back in Ba Sing Se.

'So where did you get all this anyway?' Zula asked, in firmer and more familiar territory.

'What do you mean?'

Zula looked down at herself. 'New clothes. New shoes. The trip.'

'Oh, that.' Ursa looked straight ahead, at where the market plaza narrowed into several streets. 'I traded with Captain Hui. Gave him the last of the bracelets.'

It was only later that Zula found the bracelet at the bottom of their bag, each emerald pinprick looking like a winking eye.

:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:

TBC...

**Notes/Disclaimer:** _We all belong dead_ — from the 1935 film _Bride of Frankenstein_. The lines about pillars of sand and fire are borrowed from a similar exchange in the 1962 film _Lawrence of Arabia_.


	9. Switch: Stone Heart: Part Four

**Switch: ii. Stone Heart**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom:** _Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Characters/Pairing(s):** Azula, Ursa, Zuko, Ozai; gen

**Rating:** M

**Summary:** Earth Kingdom!Azula AU. Ba Sing Se falls in a hail of fire when she is thirteen, and the Lady Zula escapes with her brother and mother. Zula swears retribution… but before she can have her vengeance, she has to stay alive in a war-torn land. Very, very loosely based on the _Snow White_ fairy tale. Rated M for violence, warfare, death, and other mature themes. Written for **au_bigbang** 2012.

**Word Count:** 26,800

* * *

><p><em><span>Four<span>_

* * *

><p>'Steady.'<p>

They called it the Night Army. Zula wasn't sure where the name had come from. It was a thing whispered about in corners, hinted at under the buzz of a market. Once in a while news would trickle down, not pasted on any notice board, unmentioned in the papers the ash-heads printed: a convoy ambushed at a pass, their attackers vanishing without a trace; barrels of blasting jelly would go missing and a garrison would be blown up weeks later.

'Don't lose focus.'

Four boulders floated around her. Zula's stance didn't change, her knees bent slightly, her arms in the Buzzard-wasp's Grip. The stream's chatter was a thousand miles away.

Buried under the hum of the earth beneath her bare feet.

The boulder on her right hurtled towards her. She slammed a wall of earth against it and spun around to crash two other boulders together. The stone's cry echoed in the forest air. The itch in her feet climbed up her legs, tugged at her muscles. She swallowed a groan and pushed her chi forward to strike at the last boulder.

A stone rose through the dirt to hit her calf. She pushed back at it with a flick of her foot, but her focus snapped like a cut erhu string. Her flesh filled with the shape of the earth under her feet, the channels and tunnels dug by tree roots. She groaned again, not bothering to swallow it this time, and pushed all she had against the boulder advancing on her.

Dirt rose around her, stung her eyes and nose. Her feet slid backwards, leaving furrows on the ground. Her body seesawed and she clenched her teeth in frustration.

In front of her, the boulder dropped to the ground and rolled harmlessly towards her. She resisted the urge to kick it—her bare feet would get a lot more damaged than the rock anyway—and turned around.

Mother had sat down on a fallen moss-covered trunk and was busy wiping her feet on the hem of her dress. Something flared inside Zula, settled.

'I want to go again,' she said.

Ursa looked up. 'It was enough for today,' she said, and slipped her still dirt-stained feet into her shoes as though she were sitting on a chair inlaid with carved jade, back in a parlour in Ba Sing Se. Silk and brocade instead of coarse wool and cotton. Tree-lined avenues instead of a tangled forest by a forgotten little town. 'We have to get back to work.'

'I could have won this time,' Zula said. 'It wasn't my fault. It was—' _That stupid itch in my feet_.

'No,' mother said as she stood up and picked up the basket heavy with berries. 'You keep getting distracted by your targets.'

'That doesn't make any sense,' she said, but Ursa ignored her.

'You're drawn into costly, pointless attacks. You're forgetting about the basics: the key to earthbending is remaining—'

'Rooted. I know.' Zula rolled her eyes as they walked out of the woods, back towards the path leading to their little cottage. Above them the early autumn sky was a hot, dusty blue. She thought of the standing stones game. She and— beginner earthbenders played it. You took turns lifting and holding together small coloured stones until someone let the tower fall apart and lost. The base, however, remained unchanged. It supported the rest. It endured forever.

Until someone broke it.

'You have to think about it as a game of pai sho,' Ursa said, as if she had half-read her mind. Zula glanced at her, but her mother's face remained expressionless. 'Think of the moon tiles. Their opening moves are unimpressive. Seemingly useless, even. But a good player knows…'

Zula tuned the rest of it out. She had never cared for pai sho, and doubted that a bunch of painted tiles could teach her anything about earthbending. Soon after they had settled into the little town of Tao Shu—a war widow calling herself Min and her young daughter Lily—and claimed the cottage with its fallen door and its veiling of cobwebs and its nest of ridged possums, Ursa had told her she was going to teach her some earthbending. Zula looked up from the wooden bench she was scrubbing raw. 'What for?' Ursa was repairing the door frame, her arms and lower legs bare, her hair pulled back under a splash of green cloth. 'You already know some,' she said, and Zula knew her mother wasn't talking about shaping peaswan-neck arches or glowing crystals. 'But you should be able to protect yourself.' A season and lifetime before, Zula would have scoffed at that. Instead she'd just nodded, and thought of the bracelet at the bottom of the bag.

She glanced over her shoulder at the forest with its yellowing leaves and spiky pines. She'd heard there was a Night Army regiment right here, hiding somewhere in the vast woods. Maybe there had been eyes in the shadows, watching her—

_fail_

—practice. She folded up the thought and put it away as the cottage's roof rose into sight. Below it, the rest of the town unfurled in its bowl of land: streets, a square, squat stone houses, the tower of a small garrison like a blunted tooth. They walked through their small plot of land with its climbing bean poles, the wire fence to keep burrowing hares away. That was the breadth and the width and the depth of their life now: the rows of vegetables in the little patch of earth; the spinning wheel and the tubs of dye where skeins of thread floated like the hair of someone drowned and whose stench made the air sting; the piles of clothes for mending. She went to bed with stew in her belly instead of the howl of hunger. If a noise startled her awake in the night it was always a cat-owl or the flapping wings of a batwolf instead of the tread of heavy boots or komodo rhinos.

No, not always. Sometimes she was stirred awake by the sound of her mother crying. Ursa always remained very still, her face turned to the wall, and the sound was no louder than a muffled sigh, the whimper of a trapped animal who knows its hunters will return soon. Zula wouldn't even notice it if her sleep were not as brittle as it was. On those nights Zula would rise before her mother did, and get started on the day's spinning, or shell some lentil-peas, or cook some porridge. Then her mother would get up, and the two of them would pretend nothing had happened, which suited Zula just fine. Comforting words were just things people spilled to cover up their embarrassment. Far better to do something useful.

Her mother's fingers brushed the small stone hanging outside by the doorframe as they stepped back into the cottage. Other stones dotted other doors in the town, each for someone lost in the war. Theirs, though, was a tigergator-eye that had sat in father's study. The glossy russet was marred by a drop of red-brown, like a pinprick of blood. 'Why don't we sell it?' she'd snapped when mother had first hung it on the door. Why didn't they get rid of it all? Bury it. Trash it. After all, Lily had barely met her father, and she'd certainly never had a brother. But Ursa hadn't answered, and after a while Zula had realised it was supposed to be _recognisable_.

That mother was still hoping that Zuko would somehow find his way to them, something coming in from the night, scratching at their door, waiting to be let in.

'Lily.'

Zula blinked, and felt a flash of anger at herself. She wasn't a dreamer. Mother finished gathering up several skeins of thread and handed them to her in a basket. 'Make sure you get a good price,' Ursa said as Zula walked back out, basket tucked under her arm.

She would, of course. Most of their thread was a perfect red.

She did a few quick calculations in her head as she wound her way down the path and the clusters of houses around her thickened. That was the sort of thing Lily—Zula had sewn a life-story for her, bit by bit; she had been a rather sticky, snot-nosed child—worried about. A good price. Watching the leaves on the cabbage-yams for signs of purple blight. Stitching seams so fine they looked like a single strand of hair. A shiver, deep in her flesh: _maybe that's what you always were. Have you thought about that? Maybe you were always Lily. Maybe Lady Zula in Ba Sing Se was just some dream you had, the fever-dream of a girl wandering in the woods or trembling with sickness in a boat or_—

_Shut up shut up shut up_. She drove her nails as deep as she could into the skin of her palm. The pain was shallow but clear, and her gaze caught in the banner hanging from the top of the garrison's tower. It was scarlet and gold, instead of scarlet and black. A peace banner, under whose wings the Empire's citizens could shelter. Something moved out of the corner of her eye and she almost spun around in a strike. But it was only one of their neighbours, a scorpion-beekeeper's veil covering her face. Zula wouldn't care about the greeting, but Lily would return it, so she she lowered her head and raised one hand in answer. The woman turned around, the end of the heavy scarf she always wore trailing behind her. Once Zula had seen what was underneath it: a handprint, burned onto her throat.

She resumed her trek, her eye still on the rippling scarlet banner. Citizens of the—

_it should have a new name this strange country it should be called_

—Empire. When she washed clothes in the river with the other girls, their hands scrubbed raw, and it was her turn to bend river rocks to slap the dirt out, she always made sure to use the biggest stones. None of them would stop on the times when a soldier would happen to ride past on an ostrich-horse or a mongoose-dragon, but it didn't matter. The soldiers never hastened, or told them to stop, or even gave them more than an uninterested glance.

All of them lived in a different country now. The scarred woman's daughter, a little girl who could firebend. Earthbenders with golden eyes. People whose grandparents had been Earth Kingdom subjects but who wore red and black. The people who moved under the golden-winged peace of the Empire with angry red ridges of flesh, or missing limbs, or eyes that stared into some spot a thousand yards away. A country with its own special rules and its own special laws.

_Stop it_. Lily didn't get angry very often, but Zula did, and so she let a few drops of it sharpen her. What did she care about this dust-ridden, moth-eaten nonsense? She kept walking, eyes on the ground, edging out of the way of other people. As she got nearer the town centre, the rows of houses were almost as close together as the trees in the woods. She thought of—

_purpose_

—the Night Army again. If they were in the forest maybe they sent scouts into towns—this town, perhaps—disguised as peasants or travelling pedlars. Maybe that was how they recruited people, the most useful ones, the best. Perhaps one of them was walking behind her even know—she could almost hear their footsteps—ready to brush past her and drop a scrap of paper in her hand. _We have been watching. Come. Come. Co_—

A shadow fell on her like a cold slap. She stopped and looked up at the garrison's tower, the dragons curled open-jawed in the corner of its roofs, the windows that looked like black, unblinking eyes. Then she edged into a corner and pretended to look for something in her basket. No one was watching her. No one would. Lily was nobody. Lily was invisible. She stole another look at the garrison. Tao Shu's sole claim to importance was that it wasn't far from the Gaipan river. The garrison was never heavily guarded, and more than once when Zula chafed too much against Lily's skin she had snuck inside and had never been caught. It was easy: the ash-heads put doors _everywhere_ and they didn't really understand anything about earth and how to shield yourself with it. She had never found or heard anything important, but that almost didn't matter. It was like doing a perfect earthbending form.

_Make sure you get a good price_. She snapped the basket's lid shut and swallowed. Her heart pushed against her lungs, and the air smelled of rust, but every nerve felt wonderfully, terribly alive. She wound her way through the alley, through the stretch of land around the garrison wall. A quick glance showed no one watching. She sidled up to one corner and touched the wall. Her muscles itched again. She felt for presences on the other side, the tread of a footstep, the heaviness of an animal. The coast was clear. She bent one corner open and shut it behind her, then hurried towards the tower. There was a window open on the first floor. Voices wafted out. Her heart sped up, her skin prickled. She swallowed again, her mouth drier, and edged under the window until she was almost sinking into the stone wall. Words drifted, sharpened. Supplies? They were talking about supplies?

'—to have taken at least twenty barrels of blasting jelly.'

Her breath hitched. She considered standing on her basket, but it was probably too weak to withstand her weight, and she doubted the added few inches would make much of a difference. Instead she pressed her ear to the bottom of the windowsill, as if that would help.

'—sure they are in this forest?'

Footsteps, but they weren't coming her way. The first voice sounded like it was coming from farther away. 'We have narrowed it down to this area.'

'The Gaipan dam would seem to be the logical target,' a woman said.

'They know we are on the lookout there. So they hide here until it's time. Or they have an entirely different target and they hope—' For a moment, the voice grew too low for her to hear. '—mind.'

'—keep a tight lid.'

A second man spoke up. 'We've never had that sort of trouble here. Our citizens are loyal.'

'Better full with the Fire Lord than hungry with the Earth King, eh?'

There was laughter at that and an almost drowned-out protestation. She drew away from the window, not even bothering to get angry. Hot anger—the kind the Fire Nation had—made you foolish. Hers was cool, a rock face. It helped her think. So the Night Army _was_ here, in the forest. Or a part of it, rather. Capture one member and the rest would vanish, unbetrayed. Cut off one head and a dozen more would spring up. _Let every speck of dirt and every grain of sand besiege your enemy_. She had forgotten most of the book she was supposed to never forget, like—

_pages consumed in flame_

—words written in sand, erased by the rising tide. That, however, she still remembered. She picked up her basket. Maybe they were—

'Hey, you!'

Her veins turned to spun glass. For an endless moment she was sure she would be unable to move forward, that her feet had turned to roots, deep in the ground. Then she took a step, another. Her breath came out, making her throat ache.

'Stop!'

She stilled. Her grip was tight on the basket, the wicker digging into her side. _Don't draw their attention. Do as they say. Don't argue. Don't get smart. Don't talk back._ She turned around, slowly, a simple peasant interrupted on her way to the market. Two Fire Nation soldiers walked towards her. Their expressions were unpleasant, but they always looked like they'd just—

_found a dead elephant-mouse_

—swallowed a scorpion-bee anyway, and they weren't hurrying. _Smile_. She felt her lips twist up, but was sure it made her look like a hyena-shark. She stopped smiling just as she felt laughter bubble up and was forced to swallow it.

'What do you think you're doing?' the woman soldier said.

'You're not supposed to be here,' the man said. They both got closer, trapping her against the wall.

'I'm sorry, I meant no disrespect,' she said, sure she didn't sound sincere. 'I was just on the way to the shops.'

She tried to take a step forward, but the soldiers edged in front of her. The man placed a hand on the wall, boxing her in with his arm. She had to suppress the urge to dart underneath it.

'This isn't the way to those streets,' he said, so close she could see every strand of his closely-cropped beard. Another inch and Zula would feel his breath on her face. He was leaning against the wall, his stance relaxed. Zula looked at the woman. She stood stiffly, almost at attention.

'How did you get in?' the woman asked, bordering on kindly.

Zula held the basket in front of her mid-section like a shield. Her feet itched again. 'No, I was just going to sell my thread but it was getting late—' _Yes, babble. Like an idiot._ '—and I thought I could really use a shortcut and then I saw the garrison and I know you're not supposed to just walk in but then I thought well it's not like I mean any harm, I just want to walk through quick as you please, and no one was watching anyway and I know it's wrong but—'

The man cut in. 'What do you have in the basket?'

_Blasting jelly_. She blinked. 'It's just my skeins of thread. I was going to take them—'

'We're going to have to take a look at it,' the woman said. Her voice was calm, a weak smile on her lips. She was trying, Zula deduced, to sound reassuring. Maternal, almost.

The other soldier grabbed the basket's handle. 'Come on, kid. Ten seconds and you'll be on your way.'

'That's mine,' she said, and yanked back.

Their expressions changed. The man's grip on the basket tightened and he stood up straight, almost pushing her against the wall. 'Kid, you don't want any trouble—' he began, but she barely heard him. She was _trapped_—footsteps in an underground corridor, the crack of twigs in snow-clear air, a burning handprint, a chained-up body, the smell, that smell, like roasting goat-pig, oh it was so _sweet_—

'Let me _go_,' she spat, and ran straight at the gap between the bodies towering above her. They weren't expecting it, so she nearly made it. The basket's handle snapped in two; she mistook it for the crack of bone. Her shoulder rammed into the woman's side, where there was only padded leather instead of plate. Something grabbed her shoulder, pulled her back.

'Hey!'

The weight of the man's hand felt like a burning brand. 'Let _go_!' She threw herself forward, clawing blindly. The man fastened his grip on her tunic and _yanked_.

She felt the slap of pain as she hit the ground before she could register the sound of fabric ripping. The world stopped. She opened her eyes. The basket lay on its side, torn open like a gutted fish, and the skeins of thread had fallen on the ground. One of then finished rolling towards her and bumped against her thigh, a red tail unfurling behind it.

The tunic's fastenings had burst open, and the seam on her shoulder had given way. Torn fabric hung on her lap. The band around her chest had come undone and her breasts were exposed, the nipples hardening in the cool air. Her scars were bared too: the ridged lines, pale against her bronze skin, that went down the middle of her chest, curved over one shoulder, finally hidden under the fabric still covering her arm.

She looked at the two soldiers. They were still, frozen like she was, like the speck of a bird in the sky, the scraggly tops of pine trees.

_Hurt me._

_I'll bury you._

They didn't hurt her. They didn't even move. Instead there was a sound like snapping wood and this time she was sure it _was_ a bone breaking.

It wasn't. It was laughter. Just a dry chuckle, at first, coming from the man. Then louder, deeper. The kind of laughter that spreads—it was spreading to the woman, and even if she did put her hand over her mouth, she couldn't stop her shoulders from shaking—and makes your belly hurt and your eyes squeeze out tears and keeps going even after you wished it would stop.

'Sorry, kid,' the man hiccuped.

The woman stepped forward. 'Let us help—' she began, but another burst of laughter overtook her.

'_Don't touch me_,' Zula yelled, and scrambled to her feet. A motion of her hand and foot and earth rose up to trap the soldiers' legs. The laughter was quelled in an instant.

'What the—' the man said, but before either of them could react, Zula turned around and ran. She slowed as she exited the garrison, but no one stopped her. No one even noticed her. There was ring of gongs and bells, no rush of footsteps behind her, no shouts, no flames. Her hand held up the torn tunic, her grip so rigid her fingers dug into her shoulder, bruised her collarbone. They hadn't believed it, she realised it. They hadn't believed that some—

_stupid little girl_

—random, inconsequential peasant had just trapped them to the ground. As they laughed. As they—

She picked up the pace, and soon ran so fast the world blurred around her. She darted away from the streets, into the fields, the edge of the woods. No one should see her. No one could see her. Windows glared at her in the sunlight, their stare dark and heavy. Her breath shook her chest, the sound of her footfalls came sharp like laughter. She ran until she had a stitch in her side, until pain was pumping through her legs, until she saw the house again with the little blood-speckled stone hanging by the front door and the rows of cabbage-yams. The table where they did their sewing. She was looking at the table.

'Zula!'

She must look bad enough for mother to drop their disguise. Ursa scrambled to her feet. Beet peels tumbled—

_skeins of thread_

_red_

—to the floor.

'Are you all right?' Ursa had her hands on her shoulders, then started looking her over like a dog worrying a pup. Zula hadn't seen her get close. Her eyes went to the peels on the floor. Little flecks of purple had spattered around them. Mother's hand were still stained with it. 'What's wro—'

The torn fabric came loose from Zula's grip and hung between them like a war banner. The breast bands had come looser still. They pooled around Zula's waist, the off-white fabric streaked with dirt where her fingers had brushed it after being on the ground. Her exposed flesh looked pathetically soft, rippled with goosebumps. She looked away in disgust. Her mother's eyes widened.

'What happened?' Ursa said, softly. 'Did anyone…' She seemed to struggle for the right word. When it came, it was in a whisper. '… touch you?'

'_No_,' Zula—

_you can say it we ran from it_

—snapped, and covered herself up again. But instead of a stone, the denial had felt like water in her mouth. Her throat ached. Her eyes, she realised, were brimming with tears. In a moment she would be shaking.

_Pathetic_, she told herself, but the anger she wanted didn't come. Instead, only pain flowed in under her skin.

_Aren't these people_ funny_?_

Her mother still needled. 'Tell me what happened.'

'There were soldiers…'

_So_ weak _and_ stupid_! Why do they_ let _these things happen to them?_

The hazel-green eyes narrowed. 'Soldiers? Where?' Mother released her. 'Tell me you didn't go sneaking around the garrison again.'

'I didn't let them do anything to me,' Zula said.

'What did you _do_?'

Zula didn't answer, but she didn't have to. Mother stepped back, sending one of the beet peels skittering across the floor. 'Did they follow you? Are they going— They're coming for you, aren't they?' Her hands balled into fists, then she grabbed Zula and shook her shoulders. 'Can't you let us have a moment's peace? It's always the same with you. Always fighting. Always looking for trouble. Why couldn't it have been—' She stopped herself. Her eyes widened. Her hands dropped to her sides. 'I'm so sorry,' she whispered. 'I—I didn't mean that.'

'No,' Zula said. The word hung in the air, filling up the little room. Very slowly, she brought up her hand to her face. Her knuckles wiped away snot. 'No. You're right. It was such a stupid thing for me to do. Inviting trouble like that. But that's what you get with me. You know, you must really hate the way that ferry accident turned out.'

'Zula, no. Please. I—'

But she had already turned away, and when mother raised a step from the floor to try to stop her, it was too late to stop her from rushing out the door. Her torn clothes hung free. She no longer cared who saw her.

She ran. She ran faster than ever before, lifting up clods of earth as she raced through the garden, slipping on the wet grass outside. She ran until she could no longer hear her mother calling for her. She ran until the trees were so close together they almost blocked out the sun. She ran until her lungs felt like they were going to burst from her chest and her thighs split in two… then she ran some more.

Her own body felled her. She dropped to her knees. One of her shins struck a root, but this new hurt was coming into a body too crowded with pain to make itself felt. She rolled onto her back—

_they're going to laugh at you_

—and sat up.

Around her the forest was silent. No cries from her mother. No footsteps. No birds.

No soldiers.

She crawled backwards until she could lean against a tree. Around her the trunks were damp with fungi, hairy with moss. The air smelled old and green. Even the shafts of sunlight looked dusty.

She lifted one hand. It shook, but not, she knew, with fear, or anger, or shame. She wiped away the tears that still clung to her cheeks, the snot drying on her upper lip.

Under her skin, the flesh had turned to granite. Marble. Basalt.

Diamond.

Everything had to be stripped away before the rock face could be revealed. Yes. She understood now. She understood it all.

_I have become invincible_, she thought as she carefully refastened her breast band and tied the torn fabric together with loose thread. The thought was fleshless, a pared-down blade of stone. Burrs and leaf crumbs clung to her clothes. She ignored them.

She was just being practical. Her nakedness no longer embarrassed her.

A flower of fire bloomed inside her head: the Fire Lord's rooms at Ba Sing Se, full of scarlet slashes, consumed in flame by the ash-heads' own blasting jelly. Herself, laughing as the fire grew higher and the earth crumbled around them. Then everything went black.

She did not mind that either.

'I know you are here,' she yelled. A starburst of pain filled her lungs. She breathed against it, forced it back as she got to her feet. 'I know you are here,' she shouted again at the thick canopy of leaves. 'I know you're probably thinking of taking out the Gaipan dam.' She took a few steps into the undergrowth as she yelled, still looking up. Only a few scraps of sky were visible. 'If you do, you are fools.'

Silence.

She lifted a rock from the ground and bended it at the treetops. It crashed through the leaves with a snap of twigs and a loud rustle and dropped back to earth. 'The plan is to take back Ba Sing Se, isn't it? Well _let's do it already_.'

The last few words were the loudest. Underneath her the earth moved, each vibration a ripple across the sole of her feet. The left foot felt number. She looked down; it was still shod. The other shoe, she had lost somewhere without noticing. She kicked the remaining shoe away and dug her bare foot into the thick green carpet. Yes. She was part of the earth now. Her roots deep under the mountains. Her skin an inconsequential film of moss. She understood. It made perfect sense.

The hum came from behind her, but she barely had time to turn around before she was struck so hard she was nearly bowled over. Ropes wrapped around her body. She yelled as she was dragged up, dangling upside down in the air. Blood rushed to her head. She tried to struggle, but the ropes bound her ever tighter. 'Cut me down! _Cut me_—'

The world flipped around again and she dropped onto a wooden platform with a bone-shaking thud. Loose hair spilled over her face. She spat out bits of fallen leaves. A blade darted by her face. She tried to spin out of the way; a blow to her back pushed her down.

'Be quiet,' a voice said above her head. 'You're making more noise than a whole herd of camelephants.'

She fell silent. The ropes came undone and a pair of legs stepped away from her.

She scrambled to her knees and looked into a ring of metal. Blade tips and arrowheads stared at her. Above them there were painted faces and hard eyes. _So many kids_, she thought, with a mechanic touch of superiority. One of the girls had to be younger than her.

A young man stepped forward. 'Stand up,' he said.

'I—' she began, but he didn't let her finish. One gesture, and a bag suddenly tightened around her head. She didn't struggle. This too was part of her destiny.

'Bring her,' she heard, the sound slightly muffled by the bag. Hot, musty air pooled around her face. She made herself breathe slowly as she was manhandled by someone much bigger than her. She went limp as she was carried in a sweaty grip. Air whistled against her body. Her naked feet dangled over some unseen drop.

After an eternity, she was dropped onto what felt like another wooden platform. She staggered to her feet and pulled the bag off her head. The young man from before stood in front of her, his arms crossed over his chest. Behind him a hut nested in the tree branches. She tried looking down over the platform, but from where she was standing, the ground was too far away to see. She looked back at him, remaining perfectly still. Gazes lay heavy on her back, from the people hiding in the branches, their arrows ready to fly at any moment. She ignored them. They were as insubstantial as midge-gnats.

'Who are you?' he asked.

'I am the Lady Zula.' There was a smirk at that, and what could have been a titter of laughter or only the whisper of a breeze.

'Is that supposed to mean something?'

She wiped some of the forest's debris off her sleeve, taking her time. 'No. The only thing that means anything right now is that you are idiots and fools if you're planning on attacking anything in this region.'

'And you're the idiot if you think we give a toss about a stranger's opinion.' He took a step forward. His voice turned lower. 'If we want, we can knock you out, drop you right in the middle of your friends in the Tao Shu garrison, and you wouldn't find us even if you razed down the forest bit by bit by bit.'

'They're not my friends,' she said, but there was no anger in her voice. She didn't think she was ever going to get angry again. The mountain face did not get angry at the ants crawling upon it. 'I am an earthbender,' she added.

'That means nothing here. Especially now,' he said. Someone wearing clothes so bulky Zula wasn't sure about their sex approached him to whisper something in his ear. She said nothing, did nothing, only waited for the exchange to finish before replying.

'You should concern yourselves less with me,' she said, 'and more with the people who have already sworn to crush you. And instead of stinging the ostrich-horse, you should perhaps consider taking down its rider.'

'What's _that_ supposed to mean?'

She could feel the tension in the still air, bowstring-taut. It did not matter. She knew she had them already, stepping stones under her feet. She pictured the trees burning, bodies stacked like cordwood in their houses and platforms, faces ropey with blood, eyes open and unseeing. She felt nothing. Then she pictured herself, her body lying naked and broken at the base of a tree, arrow shafts protruding from her flesh. She still felt nothing.

'Ba Sing Se,' she said.

There was a snort of derision at that. 'Ba Sing Se is closed tighter than a miser's fist. If you knew anything about anything you'd know it's way better to make them spread themselves too thin than waste our lives on a target we can't even hit.'

She had heard that before. Her country was a world unto itself. Glaciers snaking through mountain ranges. Deserts of burning sand stretching from horizon to horizon. Mangroves where the flowers had petals as thick and heavy as tongues. Gorges so deep you could not see the bottom. A land so vast and intricate no human army was large enough to occupy it.

It was so simple once you understood it all. Their enemies had won because they only cared about winning.

She would crush them because she cared about nothing.

'Then you are idiots. Worse, incompetent idiots.' Noise, behind the foliage. It did not matter. They would listen. 'Play soldiers in the woods if you will. Or take out the high command in Ba Sing Se with your twenty barrels of blasting jelly and start winning this war. It's up to you.'

The leader cocked one eyebrow. 'And I guess you have a plan to get into Ba Sing Se.'

She shook her head disdainfully. 'I grew up in Ba Sing Se. I was there when the Fire Nation broke through the Inner Wall. They know every street; I know every tunnel. They have sentries in every entrance; I know about the ones they haven't even dreamed of. If they've blocked something, I know five different ways around it. I know all the weak spots, all the strong spots, all the spots that will bring the occupation army to its knees once we collapse them. And when I am done… I am going to kill the Fire Lord.'

There was no laughter at that. She already knew there wouldn't be. She was the mountain. She was the rock face. If she were facing the Fire Nation's entire army, they would break upon her like paper chains.

'That's your plan? You got no call to say anyone else's an idiot,' he said. She didn't move. He was merely posturing for his people, like a strutting rooster-pig.

'In that case, I guess you don't need me,' she said with a shrug of contempt, then turned towards the platform's edge. 'I can probably bend my way down.'

'Stop.'

She drew her foot back, looked over her shoulder.

'She's a fool,' a girl with a painted face said.

'She might be useful,' the leader told her, and called to Zula with a hand gesture.

And she stepped forward, towards the shadow of the wood and her destiny.

* * *

><p><strong>++The End++<strong>

* * *

><p><strong>NotesDisclaimer:** _A country with its own special rules and its own special laws_ — from the novel and film _The Sweet Hereafter_. Inspiration for the confrontation between (A)zula and her mother after the incident with the soldiers and (A)zula's subsequent reaction to it came from the _Cold Case_ episode _Rampage_. The two scenes are substantially different, though. I actually think Zuko survived the dam disaster (and perhaps assumed the Blue Spirit persona). Then he and Zula inevitably end up in Ba Sing Se at the same time and one of those farces in which someone walks in through the door while someone else exits through the window ensues. Possibly set to the _Benny Hill_ theme tune, because obviously that's the only thing you can do after writing this sort of story. ;) No, but seriously, I think a sequel could be quite interesting if people would like to see one, but I really think I'll have to write something a little more cheerful in the meantime!

Much like my goal with _A Force That Gives Us Meaning_ was to take a sympathetic character and put her in a world in which her dedication to her family, her community, and her society have a very different meaning and consequences, in this story I wanted to take a competent villain and see what she'd be like as a relatively disempowered character caught up in an unstoppable invasion/occupation. As you can probably guess, I like to explore how characters interact with their contexts and how the effects of their actions are so deeply entwined with said contexts. All that aside, I hope you enjoyed the story!


End file.
